The Guilty Ones
by Cissy Black Malfoy
Summary: Jesse commits an error of judgment that could be fatal to Shelby, or at least derail both of their lives completely. Rated M for violence, sexual content and mature themes.
1. Yesterday

**A/N: So, I'm back from the dead. Senior year of college was just really hard, and I didn't have any time to do anything I actually liked. But, thank god, that's over now. Ironically, I actually got done with Glee in the meantime. I just feel like the show is not for me anymore. It started to frustrate me more than it caused me joy, so I decided to walk out after Idina's last episode. However, I got attached to Shelby (and a few other characters, and I hope one day I'll be able to write a Santana story too), so instead on giving up on fan fiction I just felt an even bigger urge to write. I feel Shelby was always a poorly developed and misunderstood character. _You and I_ was an attempt to make her a bit more complex, and now this fic is trying to take that to another level.**

**This fic is not related in any way to _You and I_. In fact, it might be its exact opposite. There is no Rachel, and no Will, and I must warn you, it's a dark fic, hence the rating. I was inspired by a prompt at the Glee Kink Meme on LiveJournal (sometimes I get bored, hehe), and I wanted to take up a challenge. I draft occasionally for almost a year, but now that I have time to really dedicate myself to the project, I resurrected the fic. I hope some of you will like it. I understand it won't be most people's cup of tea. But I'll appreciate anybody that gives me even a few minutes of their day, as I always have. I really, really love this project because it's different from anything I could imagine myself doing. And I hope that, at least, I was able tackle the complex dynamics of a twisted teacher/student relationship better than the writers on Glee this season.**

**This fic starts right after the events of Funk, in the first season and it's completely AU. I know it's been a while, but I hope you'll enjoy it somehow.**

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 1 - Yesterday<strong>

Nobody had any doubt that Shelby Corcoran could be quite the monochromatic presence. Nobody would argue she had a defiant preference for black in everything and anything but especially her clothes, a trait that, no one would argue either, made her even more intimidating. Occasionally a flash of color would creep its way into her wardrobe, but people were still trying to decipher the pattern there. Was it when she was feeling most confident and therefore not in the need of using the now symbolic apparel to create intimidation? But if it was, then why did she never use color after victories? It was impossible to tell also if it had anything to do with happiness or sadness, given that most people were just not privy of her personal matters at all, and she possessed the very best poker face in Carmel High.

Her office honestly looked like an extension of that idiosyncratically obsessive behavior. Her modern furniture and the leather enveloping the small sofa and the chairs were all black, and the only contrast was the white on the wall and a few other details of décor that thankfully had been chosen for balance, otherwise she surely would be working on a Addams Family-themed room.

The lonely occupant of the office rested back on the plum leather chair that hugged her hips nicely, her long walnut hair effortlessly tumbling around her angular face as she let her head fall and pinched her nose in annoyance over that faint but acute pain tugging on the center of her head. She had become a little hypochondriac after her big health issue so the tiniest pain was cause for concern, and she had to control her nervous fingers not to lead her to WebMD because that surely would only worsen her state of mind.

"You're just tired," she whispered to herself, shaking her head disapprovingly at her insanity. She had had a long month, and she was having a very long day, which had been the reason that had led her to dismiss a stunned Vocal Adrenaline at five; that had meant they only had had two hours of rehearsal. It was hardly unprecedented, but definitively rare. Shelby always insisted in working until at least six, even though her kids were allowed to fill their after lunch schedules with classes from the Arts Program only, unless there were academic problems, which meant that Vocal Adrenaline already had more exclusive dedication hours than any club. Still, she always made sure Carmel's course catalog listed VA's working hours from 14:30 to 24:00, as she reserved herself to the right to rehearse until the time she deemed fit, especially when they had important competitions and performances approaching. She didn't want anybody to have a breach to complain.

She also had gotten a permission to insert an "Independent Performance Coaching" class in the program, which was pretty much a one-on-one session that all of her soloists took at least once a week. A good deal of why her day had been long and miserable had been the fact that Jesse had managed to switch schedules with both Chris and Andrea and had booked three consecutive sessions with her, which meant she had had to spend two-and-a-half straight hours staring at his face and pretending she wasn't currently very much at odds with him over throwing eggs at her daughter.

She really did remember having the "sometimes you have to try and be considerate of other people's feelings" conversation more than once with Jesse – he had always lacked a certain empathy ability. But considering his selfish response to her almost plead that he at least apologized to Rachel and explained the situation (she had fully authorized him to disclose her portion of liability for his actions), some endless juvenile babbling about her ex-boyfriends and how she hurt him first and hence he would not try to make amends, she was very much convinced she might have imagined those pep talks.

Jesse still found it extremely hard to put himself in anybody else's shoes, something she had hoped would have happened when he accepted to help her with Rachel but she had also since discovered he had done so because it might have been "a good acting exercise". She was still to hear something coming from his mouth that wasn't exclusively about him. Even his apologies to her were all about him.

She wanted to tell him about everything that had been happening to her in that intense week. She really hadn't shared with anyone the overwhelming weight on her shoulders: the last and quite inflamed chapter of the Rachel debacle backstage at Regionals, the odd process she had unleashed by showing up at the hospital, how she had somehow ended up as the most likely mother of the baby from her biological daughter's romantic rival and her first boyfriend. How her life had become a dinner party populated by social workers and lawyers, coming and going and expecting her to graciously host and enchant her way into maternity. It still felt like the plot of a surreal film how it had ended up being agreed to by all interested parties that she should remain as a temporary guardian of the baby, at least until the state was absolutely convinced she wasn't a sociopath. Quinn and Puck had already filed for an adoption decree with the probate court and as soon as she was approved by the state Beth would be put into her care.

Granted, the idea hadn't quite landed yet. Even though she was completely healthy, Beth had been born premature and wasn't being breastfed. The doctors wanted her to gain weight in the hospital, which was buying Shelby some precious time to get the whole unexpected adoption situation together. Nevertheless, the responsibility had already been shifted into her anxious shoulders and her days had become a blur of baby shopping, visits to the hospital, redecorating her apartment, going through every paper again and again with her lawyer, having strangers ravishing through her financial and personal life and endlessly poking her in the eye over every little blemish they encountered, and they sure were many. And they didn't even know there were many more things about her she was adamant they would never dig up. Once upon a time, Jesse was the person she gladly babbled to about these things. But how could she do that then? When she couldn't make herself believe he would sympathize with the roaring commotion inside her head and her heart? When she didn't even know if he would feel joyous for her getting the one thing she had wanted more than life itself for almost a decade now?

What he couldn't understand while he pushed and pushed and sworn he was sorry time and time again was that she wasn't angry anymore. She wasn't a person to hold grudges, especially not against a kid. She wasn't keeping up with their "fight" out of resentment. She just felt alienated from him now. He just had left her feeling alone and in Shelby's opinion there was nothing more brutal than to experience loneliness within a friendship.

Trying to sit through two-and-a-half hours of him acting like a child and trying to jazz-hand his way out of the doghouse had only aggravated her to a point where she had just stood up, walked out and then childishly hid in her office. One of the things she had loved the most about Jesse was that he was one of a handful of people (and not even a complete hand) that managed to make her laugh. But now it just made her want to punch him in the face.

Unfortunately, work didn't reduce itself when she needed a break. If anything, it was only mounting up. She had finally finished preparing the finals for her Advanced Placement Music Theory class just that morning, then she had a long meeting with Dakota Stanley to talk about Nationals and other upcoming performances, and she still was responsible for organizing the Vocal Adrenaline summer camp even though she was expecting not to be in charge anymore by then. She had taught her three classes, administered the long Vocal Training exams and then ate a salad in her office while she finalized the budget report for Regionals during lunch before going off to face Jesse.

Most of why later that day she had ended up dismissing the group early had to do with the fact that she couldn't stand Jesse staring her down from the stage and being helpless to stop him for even one more second, but it was also because she had had three painfully detailed letters of recommendation to polish and rush to her contact in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. And, on top of that, she had been unkindly requested to rewrite the five-page-long babblings of Dakota Stanley into a cohesive letter for Andrea's application to the Juilliard dance program. She really rather not have to redo her colleagues' sloppy work, especially Dakota's, but she would never let one of her children suffer and lose an opportunity like Juilliard because the dwarf was too full of himself to give one of the best dancers she saw in her coaching career the time of the day.

Shelby raised her head and stared at the clock on her MAC desktop, marking just past seven. She had been lucky to finish so fast. But honestly, that part of the job wasn't a hassle at all. It was actually her favorite aspect of it, even more thrilling than the euphoria of winning. She could always find something passionate to say about even the most problematic or apathetic pupil; she loved to see them through to promising futures and renewed hopes and dreams.

She turned to her left wall, the one that was heavily decorated with black-framed black-and-white photos of Vocal Adrenaline. It had been a challenge putting that together, but she really loved that wall. They were mostly relaxed moments, little pictures she grabbed when her kids had no idea what she was doing. Of them chatting between themselves, or fooling around on stage or a special moment or two of performance. The one in the middle, the one her eyes finally settled down on, was of Jesse and her. Danielle, a soloist that had graduated the year before, had snapped it on their last Nationals. They were at their dressing room, and she had been sitting on the arm of the couch trying to stitch up a button to Jesse's shirt, which he was still wearing. He kept trying to make her laugh by impersonating all of the rival coaches and she had poked him with the needle. He had feigned indignation but ended up cracking up too, and Dani had captured that perfect moment, their eyes glistening with amusement and affection for each other. How could that be over now? Worse, how could she deal with the fact that it may never even been there? She had cared too much for that boy, she had grown to love him; how was she going to accept that he may not even care for her? But Jesse only proved over and over again that he only cared about himself.

Shelby felt her heart twist into a knot and forced herself to look the other side, take a breath and go back to work. No use in whining to herself. She scanned her to-do list quickly and decided she would give a jump start to the preparations for a festival in Florida in which Vocal Adrenaline was to perform. The club had some commercial sponsors, which was technically against the rules, but one of the top things that had made her so valuable and valued in Carmel was the fact that she had managed to bypass those rules and earn the club and the school hundreds of thousands of dollars in corporate sponsorship without actually committing any offenses. Vocal Adrenaline paid for practically anything in that school. New sports uniforms, new annex, new library, new whatever the crap the board voted that they needed and that the Booster Club and she approved. In turn, VA performed in certain events organized by the sponsors and the club was popular enough with the hot girls and boys, the acrobatics and pop songs that revenue was usually quite high.

In competition she worried more about having an impeccable composition of vocals, performance, choreography and staging in her shows, since those were the aspects that really counted for your score, but on the other instances she liked to have fun and create little concepts. The year before some of her students had begged her to let them do a vampire-themed performance, half of them being really excited about Twilight and the other half just really wanting to mock Twilight. She had given in and prepared an extensive performance that comprised David Bowie's Nature Boy, Stevie Wonder's Superstition, Florence and the Machine's Drumming, Roxanne's tango version from Moulin Rouge, Kings of Leon's Notion, Lady Gaga's Monster, Nirvana's Smell Like Teen Spirit, Cheryl Cole's 3 Words, Pearl Jam's Immortality and Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Skeletons into one huge medley, and featured the most intricate choreography she had ever worked on, with even some flying involved, and had her pupils act out the silly but certainly entertaining story of the girl who fell in love with the vampire. Jesse, of course, played the main vampire and Haylee had been their ingénue, with Andrea and Gisele grabbing huge solos as the vampire queens that were all too willing to show the mortal a very risqué (and musical) vampire version of fun, and it all ended with Jesse transforming the girl because everybody agreed that otherwise was just too boring. They had had to perform that number again at least seven times because everybody was positively addicted to it.

It wasn't exactly going to be easy to top that. She knew that half of her seniors had sent the video of that performance to their top college choices and the few that had done early admissions had all gotten in, most of them with scholarships. She knew the pressure that the parents of her junior class would bear on her. She went through her repertory list trying to gather a concept that could be used for many of her numbers; she was already dreading how elaborate she would be forced to make that performance and she really did want to utilize their year-long work in the best way possible. The theme from their last summer camp had been The Beatles so they had done a lot of that, then Amy Winehouse, Adele, Aretha and Duffy on the beginning of the year when she was trying to throw something more soulful around, plus Jesse had had laryngitis so she had benched him and used only the girls; after that there was some AC/DC, Green Day and Queen during rock month, Lady Gaga and David Bowie, some musical theater…

She pulled her laptop into her lap, kicking off her high heels and settling into an Indian pose. She opened Word and wrote down 'Revolution', '60's', 'teenage rebellion'. She went through the list once again and opened the video recordings as a playlist, listening to some of the lyrics and making more notes. She wasn't quite there yet, but she could feel a story starting to build. She managed to draft without stopping for a good half-an-hour until she grabbed her water glass, one very similar to the one she had presented to Rachel, but it was empty. She turned to her jar to pour some more, but found it empty too. She had adapted a mini-bar as a tiny fridge in her office and she reached for it only to find out she had already drained the dozen Perrier bottles she had stacked there only two days prior. With the decision of cutting all of the anxiety-eating, she had apparently adapted into anxiety-drinking water. Thankfully she had an accommodating bladder or she would spend half of her time running to the bathroom. She looked at her glass, thinking she should probably leave school around eight and so perhaps should just let it go.

But she knew she was going to get fidgety and be unable to think about anything but her imaginary thirst from that point on, so she sighed, slipped her shoes back on and got up, grabbing the jar on her way to the door.

The hallway was eerily quiet, exposing the deserted state of the school at that hour. Carmel was a strong college preparatory school with endless after-school programs, from the prestigious art's options headlined by Vocal Adrenaline to the competitive sports programs that got some real traction exploring venues that were not really options for most schools in Ohio such as fencing, horse riding (Vocal Adrenaline had paid for their stables), lacrosse and tennis, the triumphant debate and model UN teams, to the usual SAT preparatory classes and independent projects. Still, they served a very conservative community, so, with the exception of VA, every kid usually would be dismissed as soon as the sun set as to arrive home in time for family dinners.

The teachers really appreciated that too. There was no doubt in any minds in the faculty that Carmel was a beyond excellent place to work. If you could resist the pressure and the constant parental and alumni interference without developing an ulcer, chances were a teacher would be very happy there. The money was excellent. The structure was unbelievable for a school that was technically public (and she knew for sure that even though the district they served was fairly affluent, at least thirty percent of their student body came from more humble homes, and every single extra-curricular program was need-blind, meaning that if a student couldn't pay the stipends that were often quite high (especially for things such as horse riding or Vocal Adrenaline with the endless costumes, make-ups, strict diets, numerous bottles of powerful sun block, and so on) they could still participate and the school would cover the costs).The teachers were competitive but they had a sense of cooperation, and they didn't pull each other's rug as she had so often seen in other schools, in fact everybody liked everybody. Some students were pretty difficult to deal with, but most of them were a delight - well-rounded, smart, overachieving young men and women that valued so much their education, their school, their mentors, that sometimes she felt school spirit went way over everybody's head.

She had worked at Carmel since she had graduated college, ten years total, and only knew other schools from afar. She knew she had hit the jackpot being recruited by her principal straight from his alma mater and she had no idea how she would adapt working in some other place. She knew she couldn't stay. She was that teacher that had developed that ulcer, the only one that worked way beyond normal hours. And weekends. And holidays. And she had the most troublemaker students, and the least independence to make disciplinary decisions. After the year she had, it was becoming unnerving. Even after Jesse left, she knew that if she wanted a real life, she would have to give up on Vocal Adrenaline. She would probably be invited to stay at school, but could she be so close to VA and not interfere? She was so controlling, competitive and jealous, she would probably go mad.

She maybe could try her luck out of the education business. She had learned so much from VA. She knew she was an excellent creative director, and a fairly decent stage manager. But showbiz had even crazier hours, and once it was official that she was going to be a mommy, she wouldn't want that. The unknown, the infinite possibilities, it was all scaring her a lot.

She closed her eyes, keeping her hand on the water fountain so the water wouldn't stop flowing into her jar, but trying to let her mind take a break. Sometimes it was hard to silence the constant chatter going on in there. But she let herself relax so much that suddenly water fell to her hand and down her legs, startling her and making her jump two feet to her back and almost trip on her four-inch heels. The front of her pants was slightly wet, but checking herself she figured it wasn't any disaster. Laughing at her own clumsiness, she emptied the jar a little and made her way back to her office.

She was grateful that after her scare she wasn't in any way distracted, so she wasn't heavily startled when she opened her door to find Jesse slouching on her chair, feet perched on her desk like he owned the place, fussing with her laptop and listening to one of his own solos with the volume all the way up. She took a deep breath and nervously ran her free hand through her hair while she tried to figure out how to respond to that. She couldn't exactly hide under the table and even if she could, she had a feeling he would pester her until she faced him. It wasn't that she didn't want to; the case was that she honestly didn't know what to say to him anymore.

Before she could figure out a line of action, Jesse turned the volume down, looked up at her innocently and casually commented, "I think we should perform the Come Together/Helter Skelter medley. Beatles is always a crowd pleaser."

She nodded slowly, in a trance, and responded with a calm, "I'm not really liking the choreography on that right now. It's not as evocative and strong as I would have hoped. Please move from my desk," that really didn't do justice to how badly she wanted him out of her sight at that point.

"We need to speak," he announced with that little pedantic tone that grated her nerves when she wasn't in a good day. She was really not in a good day.

"About?" she asked flatly, crossing her legs and deciding to let that one exhaust itself, as it inevitably always did when Jesse figured that his strategy of the time had been argued to muteness.

"Our situation."

"Spoken. Many times."

"And yet, unresolved," he gave her a pointed look and she felt shaken. He had a point, and she knew he was suffering over that and so was she, but unless he had a brilliant solution for her dilemma, she was going to stick with ignoring it until he left for college. "I suggest putting a ballad on the beginning, a vulnerable moment. I was thinking Let It Be for me, or Blackbird for Haylee. Like on the movie version, by Evan Rachel Wood. See how I was totally not egocentric there?"

Shelby thought that a normal person might have some difficulty keeping up with Jesse's incapacity for staying on point, but she was quite used to it. Nonetheless, she wasn't very satisfied that he was trying to lead her into two conversations at once. It was a trick to keep her engaged, and a cheap one at that. She would never refuse to talk about Vocal Adrenaline with a pupil, and he was aware.

"You were doing really well until you felt the need of licking your own ego," she whispered, still without a hint of emotion, or bothering to look him in the eyes.

"Please let's sit down and have a conversation," he pleaded, a hint of desperation and pain in his tone that made her stomach hurt. But he was an actor; she reminded herself of that and tried to keep that in the front of her mind. His whole life was about expressing fake emotions and he was playing her. She didn't know for what purpose, but she was sure it was self-centered.

She saw in her peripheral vision Jesse getting up and marching towards her, and shifted on her feet agitatedly. He stopped suddenly and acted as if he was considering something, and if she wasn't certain he had planned that little pretense before hand, she was sure then.

_Yesterday_

_All my troubles seemed so far away_

_Now it looks as though they're here to stay_

_Oh, I believe in yesterday_

Shelby looked up at Jesse as soon as the melody was strangled out of his chords, sorrow dripping from it, and getting to her. He knew how music touched her deeply, where no words ever would. It immediately did. She immediately saw him the way she knew he wanted to and she felt sorry for him, evidently.

_Suddenly_

_I'm not half the man I used to be_

_There's a shadow hanging over me_

_Oh, yesterday came suddenly_

"Shit, shit, shit," Shelby cursed inwardly. She tried to make her brain disconnect herself from that room, knowing it wouldn't happen. She kept repeating to herself that he was manipulating her, but the words couldn't evade her. Not when they held so much truth. If everything had changed for her after Rachel, it had changed for him too, even more so because he was going away to college; away from his family and from his friends, and away from the mentor he had to know he would lose forever, because she was already making herself lost to him.

_Why she had to go I don't know_

_She wouldn't say_

_I said something wrong now I long_

_For yesterday _

Shelby bit her lip, tensely. Jesse had that way of making their hearts pulse on the same rhythm with one song and that one certainly said it all. They both longed for yesterday, but there was no magic that would turn them back to that moment of that photo, the time when they were happy, carefree, accomplices, content. When they didn't feel that emptiness in their hearts and tried so hard to make someone else fill it that they destroyed everything. But maternity would be a life blessing for her, and college could be good for him. If he could just accept that and keep moving on… But he wouldn't.

She was still deeply staring at the water in the jar, feeling too fragile. Her strongest parts were still standing, but he always found a way around to her heart. And now that he had her bare and engaged, what would he pull? He was walking to her, she could feel him. She always did feel him, and her body felt touched before his hands even stroked her elbows.

"What do I have to do to get it back?" He blew the words through her hair and into her ears, there was an agony in his tone, and she felt honestly sad that she couldn't give it back to him. She shook her head slowly, letting the realization travel back to him before speaking.

"You can't. All our yesterdays are lost. There is only the future. Yours. And mine. There is no ours anymore. We have different paths from here on, and they will be good paths. Good lives." She finally looked up to him and saw that he was revolted. She wanted to believe that he just needed time to make peace with the changes, but Jesse was spoiled and didn't deal very well when the world didn't go according to his wishes. She tried to convince herself once again that it wasn't her burden to carry and shrugged at him, trying to appear blasé. "At least we can end on a good note. With a victory."

"That's a fake clown smile and you know it. Anybody with eyes knows we have been broken since the Rachel thing, and you are only deluding yourself by shoving the pieces under the carpet." There was an anger to him that was so adult that shook Shelby a little off her base. But at the same time she felt self-assured of her decision. He could stand like that, not even an inch away, and not even see her. She didn't need that relationship, and it certainly wasn't healthy for her anymore.

"Maybe I am the only person I wanted to fool. I just don't have the strength for this right now, Jess. I want to look the other way, find a clear path and walk towards it. And so should you."

"It's not so simple," he exclaimed, heatedly, brushing his always perfectly combed hair with his fingers and there he was again, a man. When had he become a man? They couldn't get on the same page just that morning because he kept acting like a bratty little boy.

"I can't," he choked through greeted teeth and she once again didn't found much to do but move her head affirmatively. She wasn't being the most generous human being. He was so attached to her.

_Don't you think you've done enough_

_Oh, don't you think you've got enough, well maybe…_

_You don't think there's time to stop_

_There's time enough for you to lay your head down, tonight,_

_Tonight_

She felt the words escape her lips before she knew what she was doing; the melody wasn't quite right, but in that moment she could forsake perfection. She was just trying to have a conversation with her protégé. She was just trying to find a way to comfort him somehow. Her free hand found his jaw, and brought his eyes down to hers, boring into her, dissenting, even as hers begged him to just take rest in the unknown, to just stop trying so hard to force a door that wasn't going to open, even as her fingertips caressed his cheek; if only he could feel in the warmth of her skin that it was safe to let it go.

_Let it wash away_

_All those yesterdays_

She bit the rest back, not seeing the point, but Jesse picked up right where she stopped, his voice loud and incensed storming onto the walls of her office and reverberating around them.

_What are you running from?_

_Taking pills to get along_

_Creating walls to call your own_

_So no one catches you drifting off and_

_Doing all the things that...we all do_

They broke contact almost at the same time. She was irritated. She hated this insinuation that he made every once in a while that she wasn't human enough. How much more human could she be than when he saw her? Than in that very moment when he held her heart in his hand and was pretty much sinking his nails into it? She paced in circles, feeling abruptly claustrophobic. It didn't help that Jesse was doing the very same thing, and with the furniture blocking them, there was already not that much space as it was.

She turned to him and raised her eyebrows, and if asking "Now what?", and he scoffed before getting even more riled and screaming "I don't know what you want."

"Yes, you do! You just don't accept it. I want you gone."

Shelby only realized what she had said one second too late, when the intense hurt crossed Jesse's eyes and his open vulnerability let it clear that the game they were playing was long over. There was no more room for clever theatricality; they were just ripping at each other at that point and she was sure she had made a pretty big gash in Jesse's soul after that one.

"Well, I'm not going," he spat at her and raised his chin up and it was almost funny. She could have chuckled if it wasn't so poignant. Instead, she felt herself roll her eyes and huff a spiteful "Oh God, please don't break into that song. I'm really not into Dreamgirls, especially after the movie." And she knew that if she had any decency she would have apologized after that one because that was really one of most petty things she had ever uttered, but she just stood there, clenching her teeth at her ugliness while Jesse turned into a light shade of crimson that was all new to her. Jesse St. James was never fazed, never enough to blush anyway, but in that moment he wasn't quite that persona, and she didn't know anymore which Jesse was the one that had left her hollow.

"I'm one of the few people in this group that even knows that is not just a movie," he mumbled pitifully; now he was a boy again and she wanted to hold him and make it better, and it was all disturbingly confusing. But at least she knew what she had to do with that Jess— she had to force him to grow up.

"Should I pet you in the back for your magnanimous interest in musical theatre and your vast education in Broadway matters? Should I tell you it makes you super special? Well, it doesn't. You are not the first student that I take a liking to, you won't be the last. But you are not my friend, and certainly not anything more than that. In the long run, you'll just be… nothing." Shelby was pretty good in tearing people down; that was the main reason people were so afraid of her. But she didn't know how she had dared to voice that, especially because it wasn't true. It was just plain cruel.

Still, it startled her when a hot pain spread through her left cheek, and a metallic blood taste reached her tongue. Her lower back connected painfully with the edge of her table as the force of the blow sent her stumbling back and her legs quivered from shock. Her ear was ringing inside her head, an acute annoying sound that made her dizzy, and her lungs were panting from the adrenaline discharge against her ribcage.

It had happened so fast, it was almost an outer body experience. She had heard herself emit a moan of surprise and pain, but it felt like it came from someplace else. Her brain only registered at some point that the jar was no longer in her hand, which was clutching the side of her face, and she could feel wetness on her pants and her feet.

She instinctively whipped her head around and searched for Jesse. She almost expected him to be smug, or at least defiant, but he had a look of utter astonishment in his face and he even motioned to extend a hand towards her, but she marched towards him without even thinking, without even wanting, just a pure primal reaction. She saw he was overwhelmed by fright and shame and if she had any control over herself she would have pulled halt into her trot but something in her wanted to kill him and it was going to try.

Jesse stumbled backwards, now the one desperate for an escape; however, right as she was sure she was going to jump his neck, the door – which Jesse had been trapped against by her furious advance – shuddered under knocks and it made him jump. Shelby didn't have time to scatter out of the way, or to do anything else, because Jesse pulled her into him and clamped his hand over her mouth.

At first, Shelby yelled more of surprise than of anything else…if the pathetic, strangled squeal that barely cut the air could even be considered that. She was a few mental levels behind the idea of screaming for help. She felt her feet skid trough her soft carpet as she was dragged away from the door, bewilderment surging through her veins shortly, before giving way to rage. The struggle finally unleashed itself, as if fuel had traveled through her organism and ignited it and it was indiscernible and out of control, and Shelby could only tell one of her legs had hit Jesse's and the other had smacked against her coffee table painfully. But Jesse had a firm arm lock around her head that didn't slacken, even when he groaned from the blow against his ankle and muttered a stifle "Fuck".

Shelby rotated inside his constraining hold, and pushed against his chest, shouting harder and feeling her throat and lungs burn from the exertion and restricted amount of oxygen, and tears pressing against the back of eyes. Jesse's other arm closed in a tight tourniquet around her torso, pinning her against his chest, his much toner build successfully subduing her struggle.

"Shelby, are you in there?" She heard Jonathan's voice flutter towards her and felt a surge of relief, because surely Jonathan would let himself in and help her if she didn't reply. Sometimes he came by to bid farewell and recommend her to go home in a sensible hour, and since occasionally she worked with her ear buds on and didn't hear him knock, he would just enter.

She realized soon however that she was being entirely daft. Jesse got extremely agitated the second he recognized their Principal's voice, his expression one of pure, innocent despair. "Just tell him everything is fine," he whispered in her ear, frantically, tightening his grip on her and choking "Shelby, please" through clenched teeth. Shelby whined softly into his palm; he squeezed her into him until it hurt, but she still shook her head stubbornly.

"Shelby?" she heard Jon try again and wished he would stop being so polite. Jesse's face darkened, there was no way out. She wasn't about to show him mercy, his principal was outside her door, and if their history pointed to any outcome, it was a pretty grim one; Jonathan had never cared much for Jesse's larger-than-life personality, or the way his father's big pockets seemed to interfere with the hard discipline to which Carmel students were otherwise expected to oblige. Education-system politics were touchy.

Jesse's arm slackened off her upper body, but Shelby stayed still, pretty confident that any physical combat was unnecessary, something she dearly regretted the minute she saw a black, metallic object materialize on Jesse's hand.

Shelby felt her breathing escape, a cold terror invading her as Jesse pressed the barrel of the gun against her abdomen. Her stomach felt as if it had been filled with cement and her mouth went dry from absolute fear. She just couldn't understand. This was Jesse. Her adored, intimate, long-time pupil. She looked up into his eyes, her wires still not crossing in the right places to explain this scenario, blinking slowly at him while hoping that maybe, suddenly, the world would shift and she would find herself in a situation in which the past five minutes hadn't happened, in which it was all just a perverse deception from her exhausted mind.

Jesse looked down at her, still quite wretched, but there was surliness about him as he mouthed another plea and she meekly nodded her head, finally acquiescing.

Jesse warily removed his hand, but she made no attempt of screaming. Shelby could barely speak as it was, she was, but in the end she managed to utter a weak "Yeah, Jon. I'm sorry, I was on the phone."

When Jonathan didn't invade her office to see if she had barricaded herself under loud music, he would usually wait for her to invite him inside. Shelby didn't know what he might imagine she would do in there that would hinder his presence in the room, but had always been grateful for how respectful he was. In that moment, as the door knob stayed untouched, part of her felt royally pissed. Another felt relief though; she didn't want him to get hurt.

"What's with the water, Shelby?" His tone was filled with laugher. He was obviously amused, and not mad, or worried, as he had obviously no idea what was really going on in there, and she was not in the position of filling him in. She took a few calming breaths and forced the words out.

"Had a little accident, Jon. But everything is under control. I'll get it dried."

"Okay. Have a good night."

"You too," she muttered almost inaudibly before Jesse covered her mouth again, which she thought was rather unnecessary considering her semi-catatonic state, while they listened to Jon's steps going away from them. They stayed paralyzed in that position for what seemed like an eternity, Shelby's wide eyes resting on Jesse's the whole time in spite of the fact that he was glaring straight through her. His gaze seemed lost, desperate and pained, but after a few minutes a mask of resolution came upon him; he subtly nodded to himself and released her from his almost asphyxiating grasp. But then he opened the door and pushed her through it. "Go," he ordered. Her feet tripped forward a bit, but she was too baffled to do much else.

She turned to him and asked, "Go where?" but he grabbed her shoulder, shoved the gun into one of her ribs and then dragged her along the dark corridor. Shelby didn't have much to do with anything in that school that wasn't music-related, so her office was a few feet away from the auditorium and from the external exit that lead to the Vocal Adrenaline private parking lot. She guessed, and was proven corrected briefly, that Jesse was taking her there. The parking lot the heads of department, the principal and important visitors used was on the other side of school entirely, and even if she screamed her lungs out and Jonathan was still in the area, he wouldn't hear her. So she could only pray Jesse wasn't planning on hurting her in that parking lot.

He half-shoved her forward when they made it outside and she was free from his hold, but that gun pointed to her head was unsettling. Not being able to handle it quietly anymore she just started to plead, "Jesse, put that down. Please, put that down. I'll go wherever you want, but put that gun away."

Jesse didn't waver an inch though and made a sign for her to go over to his car, which she grudgingly did, still begging him to lower his weapon.

It was chilly outside and for the first time she realized she had left her things in her office. Her jacket, her handbag, her phone. She shuddered at the realization that if her lawyer – or worse the hospital – tried to reach her regarding Beth they wouldn't be able to and she halted her step, making Jesse almost crash into her. He grunted and grabbed her, the gun really close to her face now, but she stuck her feet against the pavement and twisted her neck to look at him.

"Jesse, please, I need my things. Please."

"Don't worry, they'll still be there when you get back for them. Carmel is super safe."

Shelby almost insisted, even gagged a "But…", except she didn't want to release to Jesse the reason she needed her phone so badly. She had no doubts anymore that he wouldn't care and was actually quite concerned he would react badly to the idea that she was getting a baby.

She tripped again when she shoved her forward, and gasped for air when he squeezed her body against the car while he unlocked the passenger door. He forced her inside of the black Cadillac that, if she wasn't mistaken, belonged to one of his parents; the door was rammed behind her, and that made her heart beat even faster if that was possible. She was convinced she was going to vomit it any time now.

When Jesse entered the car through the other side, the cabin light came on again and she stared at his toughened profile. She couldn't even recognize him. Or could she? Some part of her was familiar with that look in his eyes; that detached but focused look that told her he was out of this world. A look that was icy cold but burning at the same time.

She tried thinking of him on stage, but rapidly gave up. Jesse was a man on mission on stage, imperturbable, true; but he was also emotive, open, and vulnerable to his utmost.

Shelby felt trapped in a sort of trance. She was certain some other Shelby Corcoran would have kneed that boy by now, and would be raising hell inside that car until either one of them was dead, but she felt very much like every muscle in her body was anesthetized with the exception of her face which felt tight to movement, as if it had shrunken under her skin, and still, it burned as if somebody had dropped boiling water on it and that whole side of her face was about to undo itself and fall off.

The car came alive, and her stomach felt as if it had been filled with razorblades. Jesse got out of the parking lot and took the narrow streets leading out of the school and into the quiet, luxurious residential lanes in the outskirts of the school. The lights on the Victorian mansions were passing as a blur but she knew that there were people all around her; lots of that people being her students, their parents, their siblings, but nobody that could help her. She was right within their reach and they didn't even know. But the idea that she might want a stranger, any stranger, to just hop out of their house and save her was deeply troubling. She was inside a car with a person she had loved and trusted for a really long time. She didn't want to really feel she was in danger, even with all things that had occurred taken into account, but she couldn't help herself. Maybe it was just her 'flight or fight' response, but she had this nagging sensation that the world was closing in around her and that if she didn't escape, something bad was going to happen.

"What now, Jesse?" she mumbled with so little power she didn't sound very much like herself. Jesse ignored her, of course. They drove for what seemed like half-an-hour, but it could have been more or less. It was probably a lot less. Shelby wasn't really able to tell time anymore or discern where they were headed, she was too burdened with anxiety, but she didn't think Jesse could either.

"Where are we going, Jesse?" His lack of response confirmed her suspicion. They passed more and more houses, time kept clocking away, and she even chanced a look at the digital watch on the panel but she couldn't recall anymore what the time was when she had last checked. She let her head drop and her dark brown hair cascaded around her face, protecting it from Jesse's view, and she shut her eyes and took a breath, willing herself to keep calm. When she opened them again, she spotted dark-red droplets over her silk blouse and her pants, and was puzzled until she remembered what had happened in her office.

She stretched her neck and managed to catch a glimpse of her messy appearance on the rearview mirror, complete with a small trail of dried blood running down her angular chin. She would have looked like one of her kids in the Twilight performance if not for the fact that her lip was cut and swollen, and there was already a dark discoloration forming near her cheek bone. She even hadn't realized Jesse had backhanded her so viciously.

He was spying her reaction from the corner of his eye and she caught him staring. They both huffed their feathers and looked away from each other at the same time, like stubborn bratty children, except she had very good reasons to be so resentful.

Shelby could tell they were driving in circles, but somehow that didn't calm her at all. What seemed pointless could very well be that until she provoked Jesse enough for him to hurt her more; and if it wasn't pointless, she was sure she wouldn't be pleased with his endgame. "Where did you get that gun, anyway?" Nothing. She looked at him, and his face remained the same. Hard.

Suddenly she had a flash from when she had seen that expression before. Jesse had been a sophomore, and he had gotten in a fight with some boy that had called one of his teammates, a boy she liked very much named Nate, a faggot. Andrea had run and got her, and she had marched down the hallway to find Jesse and the other boy pretty much pounding on each other on the floor. Shelby wasn't really one to go around shouting on students, so she had done what she always did when she wanted their attention, she clapped loudly until they looked at her. She had only needed to clap twice.

The other boy had immediately crapped himself at the sight of her, but Jesse had remained with that look on his face, even after she raised an eyebrow at him and he had gotten the clue and gotten up and followed her. She recalled that even as she battered him verbally, she had cleaned the blood from his nose and held a pack of ice to his face because she couldn't stand to see any one of her students hurt. But she sat in his car, bleeding, and he didn't even ask if she was fine. Well, not his car.

She also recalled abruptly when she had seen that car. It was Jesse's mom's and she had actually seen it the same day of that fight, when the woman had been invited into the school to talk to Jonathan. That had been one of the many times she had seen Jesse's mother, Heather, but one in which she remembered distinctively that she had been carrying a weapon. She sighed and shook her head at Jesse.

"Your mother." He did stare back at her this time and she managed to catch a glimpse of fear. "It's your mother's. For Christ's sake Jess, she's the county's FBI head! I don't think she'll take too well to her son committing a federal crime."

He looked positively frightened then, as if the realization had finally sunken in, and yet he refused to talk to her.

"What do you intend to do to me now, Jesse? Do you even have a plan?"

She saw him cringe for a second, but then his face illuminated and she was very much aware that he had gotten an idea. He turned on a few streets she didn't identify at all, then for the first time made it to a main road, and she comprehended that she was fucked.

Jesse finally stopped at a red light to wait to cross into the avenue that would connect them to downtown Lima and a few other upper-class neighborhoods such as her own, and Shelby didn't even mull over much. She swiftly thrust her car door open and tried to jump out, but Jesse was very shrewd himself and flew over her body and grabbed the handle, slamming the door closed before Shelby had managed to wriggle herself out of the vehicle.

Shelby wasn't able to control herself and cried out loudly as the door violently smashed against her side, her head connecting with the glass, making pain explode throughout her muscles and black dots start dancing in front of her eyes. Jesse steered the car into a dark side street, muttering curses under his breath.

Shelby supported her heavy head on her trembling hands. It was like for a second she had been engulfed into darkness, but then it dissipated quickly and she just about wished it didn't. She noted a low, almost childlike whimpering pervade the otherwise uncannily quiet vehicle; it seemed like something out of a horror movie and albeit she apprehended in some level that she was the one producing the sound, it indeed scared her.

She felt Jesse's hand on her head and flinched away as far as she could; unfortunately, in the cramped space of a car, the farthest away was pressing against the door that Jesse had just used to brutalize her, and that evidently was not nearly enough distance. He bent over her legs, popping the glove compartment open and perusing it, but she didn't even open her eyes to try and comprehend what he was intending.

She felt a pinch on her wrist and she mechanically pulled her arm closer, but it only jerked back and she realized, stunned, that Jesse was holding the little chain connected to the hoop he had just clenched around her wrist.

"What are you doing? Stop!" she shouted, and her alarmed voice was raspy and stifled, but nonetheless it was authoritative for the first time, and it fed a certain mutinous wrath inside her. "No!" she screeched, trying to push Jesse away; her arms flung against Jesse's shoulders as she yelped "Get off me! Get the fuck off me, Jesse!" and unconsciously hoped either he would take pity of her or some passing driver would notice the commotion and help her.

None of that came to be, though. She felt both of her upper arms being gripped and her torso being shaken violently and Jesse yelled at her face "That's enough!" Shelby went mute and blinked at him, frightened. Nobody had treated her like that since she was twelve and it made her feel exactly like that perplexed little girl again.

Jesse seemed to notice that and calmed down. There was a flash of self-doubt and guilt, but then he was back to business; he helped her get out of the intricate position she had landed during the altercation, and arrange herself correctly on the seat.

She felt his palm close around her hand, and found it surprisingly clammy. He brought it around to what she guessed was the door handle and asked for her other hand, but she couldn't quite place where he was holding the hoop through her blurry vision.

"Shelby, give me your other hand," he repeated, impatiently, but she was too dizzy to be able to focus her eyes. She could have just told him that, and probably should have, but instead she just neared her hand to the position of her other arm, and felt the metal click around her wrist.

Through her glazy sight, Shelby distinguished Jesse shutting the glove compartment, before straightening his body properly in front of the wheel.

She rested her pounding head against the seat and tried to take deep breaths and calm herself down, but even with the movement of the vehicle being so slow as Jesse restarted it and drove away, it was making her nauseous and more lightheaded.

She thought about how far from her baby she was getting and it made her even more anxious. If she lost custody of Beth because the hospital or the state tried to find her and she wasn't available, she wouldn't think twice before taking vengeance in Jesse. She wouldn't hurt him; nobody should go through what she was going through. However she could always get UCLA to pull his admission.

She mulled over how to make him pay for a while, but then realized she couldn't do that. She wasn't a kid and she couldn't lower herself to his level by hurting him because he hurt her.

She tried to take deep breaths then and relax but it was impossible.

"Jess, please, if you really do care for me, just let me go. This isn't funny, and it has gone too far already. Please stop before a tragedy happens." She knew she had sounded like she was whining, but the truth was she was indeed very close to weeping, even more so after his stoic reaction.

It hadn't been easy for her to side with Rachel on the egging matter. Even if Rachel was her biological child, Jesse was the one she loved, she was connected to, the one that needed her and always sought her out. But she felt his actions and his reasoning had been cruel then, and he was doing it again. It was almost impossible now not to put herself in Rachel's shoes. She had always thought Jesse was the one student she could trust, the one that would never betray her. She looked after him, and he had always given the impression that he tried to look after her, in that boyish, cocky, sloppy way of his. Now he was the person submitting her to a perverse violence, and his eyes were blank from any compassion, any concern. No wonder Rachel thought he didn't have a heart.

Shelby's vision had cleared considerably by then but she gained a raging headache instead and she started to feel very faint, a condition not aided by the movement of the vehicle. A car passing on the opposite direction with a particularly intense headlight made her eyes throb in an excruciating manner and she shut them reflexively, but her eyelids felt too heavy to open again, and her head was becoming too light to be able to sustain any more thoughts…

GLEEGLEEGLEE

Shelby felt an icy blanket of air involve her and shuddered. There were two hands on her shoulders and they were shaking her gently. She heard her name being called twice, and opened her eyes with some difficulty. It was agonizing to keep them like that, but she tried her best not to let them close again. She looked at Jesse, who was towering above her.

"What's your middle name?"

Shelby frowned at Jesse's question— was he trying to get her money from the bank or something? But then it hit her. She had injured her head and then lost consciousness for an unknown amount of time.

"Teresa, because of Mother Teresa. My mom was very devout," she mumbled, not able to recall even if he even knew her middle name, and how.

"What day is today?"

"Friday, March 26th, 2010," she groaned, already impatient.

Shelby turned her head to the side, and glanced beyond Jesse. There was a sizeable cabin behind him, all lit up. It was beautiful, but she was sure she had never seen that place before, and once the events of that night caught up to her, she felt drenched in fear. She heard Jesse talk again but didn't really pick out what he was saying, and he seemed displeased.

"Where am I?" she muttered, horrified.

"My house," he answered with a blasé attitude and a shrug.

"This is not your house," she contradicted, trying to shake her head. She had been to Jesse's house countless times; she was always invited to his parents' stupid dinner parties.

"Yes, it is. We have many houses," he answered with a sigh, then picked up her up in his arms and carried her out of the car and towards the cabin.

She tried to hold onto his shoulders but noted that her hands were still handcuffed together, and she might have offered him a disapproving glare but her strength gave out and her lids dropped. Her head was leaning loosely on his shoulder, but moving too was an effort she seemed unable to afford.

She smelled when they changed environments. Outside was fresh and smelled like trees and wet dirt, and inside the air was heavy – as if it had been trapped for a long time – and there was a distinctive scent of wood mixed with industrialized air freshener.

Shelby was lowered carefully into a soft surface, and her back was propped against what could only be a pillow. She speculated if she could use the little force she had left in her body to drag herself down to a lying position, but before that, something icy and wet touch her chin and her eyes shot open in alarm.

Jesse was holding a towel in his hand and he mumbled a "Sorry," before pressing the cold cloth against her skin again. He was truly being gentle, and it staggered her a bit.

"You must hate me a lot," she whispered accusingly.

Jesse shook his head and retorted somberly, "I could never hate you," never taking his eyes off her bruise and the work he was trying to do.

"Then why are you doing this to me?" she whined, defeated, exhausted and revolted.

"Because you are hard-headed, but so am I. I cannot be expected not to fight back, not to try and recover something that I love."

"Wow. If you do this to who you love, I really don't want to imagine what you would have done if you hated me."

Jesse sighed, looking perturbed for the first time, and their eyes met. He was wordlessly apologizing, and it was intense and sincere and it left her at a loss.

"Shelby, you have to know I never meant to hurt you. I just needed your attention and then… Things just got out of hand so fast. I was afraid you were going to get to Mr. Baris and get me expelled."

Ironically enough, it had never occurred to her to get Jonathan involved after Jesse slapped her; she was going to handle him herself. She wasn't even aware Jon was still in the building until he was at her door. Once Jonathan had been outside though, she had only wanted to get out of there; Jesse's extreme reaction scared her, and she hadn't had time to think if she wanted him to be expelled or not.

Jesse finished cleaning her chin and her lips and then regarded her with what had to be pity, which only enraged her. He shouldn't pity her— he should be ashamed of himself for doing what he did. Jesse left the stained towel on the bedside table and stared at his lap, apparently embarrassed for a moment, fumbling with his own fingers, before hesitantly trying to brush her long bang off her face but she slapped his hand away. His rage came back, like a little switch she kept turning so easily that it was astonishing, and she regrettably cowered away a little.

"You know, I'm the only person that would do anything for you, and I did. You have nobody. Nobody has the patience for your high-strung, controlling, icy, back-lashing personality, but I don't even care that you are not breezy and low maintenance; in fact, that's what I love about you. I'm smart enough to see that there is something twisted in our sick dynamic and I honestly always half-expected this co-dependence to end badly someday. But who else are you planning to turn to? You feel alienated from Rachel and you don't have any family, any friends. I bet with you that nobody will even notice you are gone. When we get back, nobody will even imagine you were ever taken. Nobody will have worried, nobody will have cared. And you are gonna want to tell somebody, but I know you. You'll be embarrassed, and you'll feel self-conscious about asking somebody to sit down with you so you can talk about your problems. You don't rely on people, and you always assume nobody wants to have to put up with you either way, which might be true. The only person who ever wants to hear about your fucking problems is me. So you are gonna suffer in silence until it consumes you. For days after now, and then for weeks after I leave; hell, probably forever. And it will be well-deserved."

Shelby felt her core shatter into pieces. She had been told a lot of bad things, by him included. She had had to put up with pretty disappointing and shaking statements from her daughter. She had been dismissed by men in varied spiteful manners. But that had to be the most brutal, nasty attack she had ever taken from someone, and it ached all the more because of how much she adored Jesse.

The worst part was that he was on point and they both knew it. But she would never forgive him for using how intimately he knew her to cause her so much misery.

A tear slid down her cheek, cold. Then another, and another, and another. She hid her face on her knees and tried to bite back the sobs but her body was shaking and she couldn't prevent that. Jesse's fingers brushed against the naked skin of her arms but she managed to utter a strangled "Get away from me" and after a few seconds his weight lifted from the spot next to her on the bed. She spied between her legs Jesse dragging his feet through the room and then exiting it, and she at last let herself go. A sob wracked her body and the others came in quick succession. She managed to lie down on her side, but other than that her body was barely responsive and she was sincerely beyond caring. She was crying so hard her whole torso became sore, and she was gripping the covers so tight her fingers started to go numb.

She felt a hand creep up her arm again and flinched, but that didn't make it hesitate. She felt humiliated and sickened that Jesse had dared to come back in there. Nevertheless, she kept crying, and she believed that considering everything, she was only entitled to. His hand went up to her face and tenderly brushed her hair away and it kept caressing it, while his other hand rubbed her back soothingly. She didn't want to admit it, but his touch on her scalp and body did take her back to a time when she could just let him throw his arm around her shoulders and even the smell of his hair would make her feel content, the same arms that held her after she had seen Rachel perform during Sectionals and she couldn't stop shaking from the shock. She also had to give it out to him the fact that he was being somewhat respectful and just waiting and silently comforting her until she ultimately managed to calm down.

"Shelby, please, I'm sorry." Jesse patted her arm and pressed his body further against hers, almost as if he wanted to embrace her but didn't have the guts. "I didn't mean what I said," he whispered softly, and his tone did carry an ounce of regret.

"Yes, you did," she retorted grudgingly.

"Ok, fine, yes I did. But what I meant was that I know how much you need me, and I'm not going to let you push me away. I'm here for you."

Shelby tried to turn on her back but Jesse was so close up against her that she ended up on this weird position with half of her back perched over his knees.

"You are here for me? Assaulting and abducting me? That's how you are here for me?"

Jesse grabbed one of her hands into his, caressing it softly. He had done that the day she had had the first encounter with Rachel and had run to the music room to hide; he had found her sitting on the floor, behind the piano, utterly devastated.

It seemed such a thin, bizarre line— the one they had crossed. One week they were fine, he had been comforting her; next one she was convinced he was the devil.

"I didn't want to do any of those things. I wasn't thinking, I was just reacting, and I just lost it."

"You know the things that you said were true. I am all alone and I'll probably always be. And what you did proved me right. You don't care about me. You didn't stop to think about how much distress you were causing me for even one second of the hours, HOURS, I spent sitting in that car next to you, scared and hurt. You know what type of person is like that? A sociopath. A monster. You only like people for what good they serve you and when they don't you treat them like crap. How can I go on when all I think is that every nice gesture you take towards me has an agenda? And now this? Could you be any more self-centered and vicious?"

Shelby turned on her side again, giving him her back and taking her hand from his clutch. He'd always be good at consoling her but it was hard to let him when she couldn't shake the feeling that she was being played.

"What can I do to prove you wrong? I do care about you, I do love you. I'll do anything to prove it to you. Just tell me what."

"Take me home. Now." She wasn't begging or whining this time, she was demanding.

Jesse nodded, agreeing, but there was something bitter and far from submitting in his nod. "And then what? You won't talk to me, you won't look at me. You are not even teaching me properly anymore; you're hurting the whole club because you are angry at me. How was I going to earn your friendship back like that?"

"Friendship is about respecting the other person and I don't feel very respected right now. You're not showing me much respect by taking me hostage at gunpoint."

"I know. You are absolutely right. But I'm right too, and you know it."

Shelby sighed, knowing there was indeed enough blame to go around, and softened her voice.

"I do know it, and I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I just wanted us to stay away until you left because it was too hard not to be able to trust you anymore. It was too hard to think the person I adored was not the person I thought I knew, and that I was indeed surrounded by a bunch of strangers who only gave a shit about what I could to for them."

"I changed schools for you! I dated your daughter!"

Jesse threw his hands in the air, exasperated, and it took her mouth a moment to gather her reply. She wasn't happy that she had been shocked into this, but guessed that after being slapped by him, it was only natural that her body would hesitate anytime he showed signs of losing control. Natural, but surely maddening. She gave him a hard look instead and finally mumbled dryly, "No, you did that because it was a good acting exercise."

Jesse eyes filled once again with what looked like despair, and his hands grabbed the sides of her face in a way that was also clearly filled with anguish and barely crafted to comfort her at all.

"Shelby, that's not true. C'mon. I did it, mostly, for you."

"Why?"

"Because you are really important to me."

"But why?" she defied him again, trying to make him understand that, "I need you, I adore you, I, I, I, I…" just wasn't going to help him at that dark intersection of their lives. That attitude had actually landed him there, and considering how much of a grim turn the circumstances had taken, it was only further rubbing her the wrong way.

Jesse only stared at her for a while, and then seemed to try and come up with a response, going as far as to open his mouth several times, only to shut it again a second later. Finally, he conceded defeat, shaking his head.

"I don't know."

It was hard for Shelby to pretend that she hadn't held that tiny bit of hope that she would get a magic answer that would make everything acceptable, and the silly anticipation probably exploded on her face into a disenchanted scowl.

"You can never, ever, put yourself in somebody else's shoes, can you? I want you to go, and try to put yourself in mine, and then come back and talk to me. You wanted a chance, here is your chance."

She watched as Jesse warily left again, and tried to focus on not falling asleep, an almost impossible task when she was so drained. She hadn't experienced any slurred speaking, she realized, and her vision had cleared considerably but the headache was crushing, probably propelled further by how much she had cried, and she also still felt sick. All of that made her feel so weak that even the thought of Beth didn't make it so appealing to go back to the city right at that moment, but she comprehended that she was likely being unwise in not insisting to go back right away. Her brain could be swelling; she could be in need of a hospital.

Shelby heard Jesse returning and rolled her eyes, conjecturing why that kid was so bad with simple instructions, but when he came to be in front of her she felt a little sorry for being so callous. Jesse had a little key with him and promptly enough he managed to get the handcuffs off, something she was much too grateful for. The metal rings were starting to chafe her a little and there were two thin red lines around her wrists after Jesse removed them.

Then he offered her a tall glass of water, which she drank as if she had just spent years in the desert. It relieved her aching throat a lot and made her nausea subside considerably. She sort of understood now how Rachel could drink water when she was sad. It did have a calming effect to it.

She tried to give the glass back but Jesse had vanished and, with some trouble – her arm felt so heavy – she managed to put it on the bedside table instead. She dropped back on the bed, and, as well as her stamina would allow (which was not with excellent efficiency) tried to bring the pillow down. Fortunately, Jesse materialized back by her side and eased the pillow under her head.

He took another cloth to her face but this one was warm, and he cleaned off her tears and the makeup that doubtlessly was smeared all over her skin, and then he pressed it kindly over her temples, forehead and eyes.

"You know this is not what I meant, right?" She didn't want to be thick-skinned, but that whole thing seemed like him trying to cut a corner proving that he could care for her.

"I know. Just thought you could use some rest, and that it would be hard to settle down after all that."

"Thank you," she managed to stagger out, but barely. She was almost gone. It was undeniable that the warmth and smoothing movements were indeed relaxing her and easing her into sleep. Then she remembered… She grabbed his hand to get his attention and made him stop.

"I could have a concussion," she explained.

"You seem lucid," he countered calmly.

"My head hurts, and I don't feel so well. I need you to wake me up in an hour, to make sure I haven't slip into a coma or something, and check if I'm disoriented."

"Okay, okay," he agreed, resuming what he was doing. He let his other hand slide upon her head and his fingers trailed her skull skillfully, trying to help her headache, hopefully. It did, only a small degree, but it was enough for her already worn out body to surrender and in a minute she was out cold.


	2. A Knife Throwing Kind of Love

**Chapter 2 - A Knife-throwing Kind of Love**

Jesse remembered perfectly the first day he met Shelby Corcoran. It had been the day that Jesse had trusted that his lifelong dream of being a star was still very much alive, something that he had begun to doubt at that point in his life. Back at the time, his family has just settled into Toledo due to his grandfather passing and leaving to his father the control of the family owned-business, which as far as Jesse knew – and he didn't know much to this day – manufactured glass. Glass— it was pretty cut and dry, simple to the point of unfairness towards the true nature of the St. James's, but at the same time it elevated them. Socially, that was.

They had just moved there from California, where Jesse's father, Theodore, had clung to his fairly successful career as an entertainment lawyer until the very inevitable last second. Needless to say that being forced to move to Toledo, Ohio hadn't made Jesse very happy either. It hadn't been easy on anybody on his family, really. His father was a clearly burdened man, pressed not only with a company he didn't care about but with three kids trusted upon him by Jesse's mother relocation to the Cincinnati FBI office (Cleveland was closer, and she had eventually ended up there, but at first they didn't have a place for her). Heather spent most of the week away, hurdled to a condo on the other side of the state entirely, and Theodore had had to pretty much raise him and his siblings on his own.

The out-of-control, staggered offspring rapidly overwhelmed the man though; and being a difficult man, with little patience for failure and little time to cope with his wife's glaring absence, Theodore had had no problem in dealing with his older siblings by the punitive course. Jesse supposed he should have been thankful that he had always been his favorite, always having shared with him the love for the art of motion pictures, always too willing to sit with him throughout a night of John Wayne movies, and always accomplished and dedicated in his eyes, because at least he hadn't ended up at Culver, a military boarding school, with his troublemaker brother and his hysterical bulimic sister that only his dad couldn't understand just wanted his freaking attention.

Just a year before moving, Jesse had gone to Disney World with his parents, where he had been faced with the sharp performance of a singing and dancing group (he had no idea what show choir even was at that point). It was a number inspired by Moulin Rouge, and it featured a really creative medley between Lady Marmalade, Hey Ya and Crazy in Love.

He had been drawn to it with just about the same intensity as every other normal kid in the park was drawn to the rides. For Jesse St. James, of course, Disney paled in comparison to Vocal Adrenaline. He snagged some performer on scene, like a giddy fan girl, and hounded him enough to find out that, coincidently enough, they were from Ohio.

The same state in which Jesse would find himself tragically trapped just briefly after. As soon as he had remembered the name of the group, Jesse had researched everything about Vocal Adrenaline. He had grown up getting to know celebrities and hanging around studios while his dad chalked up contracts, and he had known since he was five that he wanted to be an actor. His room always had been covered with posters of Marlon Brando and James Dean, and he had always used his hair like theirs and his favorite wardrobe piece had been a leather jacket since he had been old enough to choose his clothes.

So, it was only expected that as soon as he had briefed himself on all Google could offer him on Vocal Adrenaline, he had sought out Shelby Corcoran, the woman behind the exuberant and intriguingly fun school club that seemed to be entertaining audiences all over the country, despite their origin at the corner of some dingy city by name of Lima, in a over-the-top school that served mainly a community comprised of the latest generations to inherit the seemingly never-ending Lima oil money.

It was like a Westchester-type of community compressed inside a city that was otherwise very much Ohio, very much small, and common, land of simple all-American folks and all of that. He had found the school, and then Shelby's office that was, at the time, a lot more crowded with trophies (she had eventually moved everything into the music room) and sober. He had broken in, of course.

She had been pretty startled when she had arrived, crushing an immense stack of music sheet against a plain button blouse that seemed very much like the ones his mother used, and looking out of breath and exhausted.

She had screeched a "Who the hell are you?" and squeezed her eyes at him menacingly, but considering who his mother was, she really would have to have done better.

"I wanna audition for Vocal Adrenaline."

She had looked at him like he was crazy, chuckled and gotten behind her messy desk. (Jesse had admit something: he hated Dakota Stanley forcefully, but Shelby's life had gotten 200% easier ever since the dwarf had come along, and afterwards when they had hired the art people (costumes, sceneries and props) and then a stage manager. She had become a lot more together, and had even found time to do things like redecorating her office and buying everybody rewards, and eating and sleeping, something he wasn't so sure she did back then.)

"What's your name?" she had asked with more patience than he thought she would demonstrate.

"Jesse St. James."

"Okay, Jesse St. James. We appreciate enthusiasm for our group, but you have to attend this school to be a part of Vocal Adrenaline. What grade are you in?"

"Well, 7th, but…"

"Come back in two years."

She had started going through a stack of paper, but he hadn't given up. He had met a lot of actors, he had talked to them about rejection. He knew never to take 'no' for an answer. He rounded her table and sat on the tip of it, right next to her and started belting Somewhere Over the Rainbow. She had seemed annoyed, but slightly amused too, and had actually stopped shuffling through her papers in order to listen to him.

He still recalled perfectly how Shelby's eyes seemed to fill with different emotions listening to the song, and she didn't hold anything back. He had always loved attention, but even he felt naked before her. When he was done, she gave him a small smile.

"You have a very good voice, Jesse St. James. Good range, nice tone."

"I've been classically trained since I was three."

"Impressive. But what were you thinking about when you sang that?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?" she had frowned. A knowing, motherly kind of frown. "Why did you choose it?"

"It goes well with my voice."

"Don't do that. When you sing, try and find something in that song that you can connect with, that has meaning to you. Try to bring it to your reality and put all of your heart in it. That's what performance is all about."

Shelby talked with her hands, frantically, passionately. Her eyes glistened while she spoke with him, but she wasn't self-conscious at all. He might have fallen a little in love with her at that moment.

He had only been able to stagger a weak "Okay" because he couldn't stop gawking in admiration at that woman. That messy woman with a messy ponytail, a loose simple shirt and badly concealed dark circles under her eyes, that was still the most beautiful woman he had ever met.

"Do you dance?"

"Not really."

"Well, I can tell you, half of being a show choir performer is dancing. More, if you are not a soloist yet. The scores that we get in competition have a great weight placed on choreography, staging, synchronism, and dynamism, and it all comes down to my students' ability to learn their movements with surgical precision. How old are you— thirteen?"

"Twelve."

Shelby had picked a piece of paper and scribbled something on it, fast and then gave it to him.

"This is one of the best dance teachers I've ever met. He specializes in late bloomers, boys especially, most of them being actors that want to become triple threats and need hard, intense training. He tutors in Cincinnati, which I realize is really far, but if you are really serious…"

"I am!"

"Look, Vocal Adrenaline is a pretty demanding club. Long hours, hard work, no social life. I don't allow my students to take any other activities that aren't Vocal Adrenaline, and frown at dating drama. I kick students out for tantrums, and I don't tolerate whining about the efforts required to stay in it. I also have to warn you that your academics will suffer; Vocal Adrenaline performers take reduced credits so they can be in my music classes and other pertinent classes on the art program. If this is not what you want for your future, this and nothing else, and if you are not willing to give me your entire life, and more, then this is really not the place for you. Fortunately you have two solid years to think this through, Jesse St. James. So do."

Of course, thinking had not been what he had spent two years doing. Before he left her office that day, the decision was already made. He moved in with his mother in Cincinnati, and changed schools so he could take the dancing training, and then he had found a wonderful vocal coach too and everything was even more perfect. He spent most of his time practicing and all of his free time pretty much stalking Shelby Corcoran. Emailing her updates, recordings he did in his home and of performances at school, asking for her advice and just basically nagging her to death.

The thing about Shelby though, was that she was very generous, despite everything she had going on, and she had always responded his emails very benevolently. She always had tips about the recordings he sent her, always had a kind word to spare, an expression of concern if something seemed off, a link for a new Vocal Adrenaline video for him to check or even a suggestion of something cool on Broadway to inspire him. She had been the one to get him hooked on musical theater, of course. Thankfully, those two years had rushed by, and he at last landed at his dream (with a little string pulling from his dad to place him in a public school that not only wasn't in their district, it wasn't in their freaking city).

He still remembered walking those hallways for the first time as a student, and the only thing he had cared about had been, once again, locating Shelby Corcoran. Luckily, he had found her without having to commit any misdemeanors that time around; she had been standing in the middle of main hallway, talking to their principal, who he was sure had had just a big a crush on Shelby as he had.

He had waited it out for the conversation to end, not really wanting to be introduced to the man that had been at the time shooting stars through his eyes at Shelby, and then joined her as soon as she walked down the hallway.

"Ms. Corcoran. Hi. I go here now."

"Hi, Jesse St. James. I kind of figured," she had chuckled, amused, asked him to hold her cup of coffee and opened her briefcase from where she retrieved some papers and handled them to him.

"Here, let me run you through it. Auditions for Vocal Adrenaline are in one week. Fill out this first form, and leave it on my desk, with a photo and a recording of your vocals. Now I have enough of those, but I'll let you choose whatever you think is best and leave it for me with your application. This is the list of pre-approved songs for the audition. Chose three; one should be _a capella_, and at least one has to be _up tempo_. Then you chose one of these songs and you pull together a dance variation. The list of basic movements required is right there, and it should not run longer than three minutes. There will be an improvisation element too, and an ensemble element, which you'll be presented with at the time. We screen by groups first, like Broadway. Too many applicants. The other papers are for the soloists audition; I'm sure you are gonna want to do that. It's only next month, but you can start preparing; it's pretty competitive. You choose four of the approved songs, one has to be performed _a capella_, and two have to be performed with dancing. Now, two pieces of advice. One, choose songs with really good runs, that display your range nicely. And two, try running and jumping while you sing scales; it'll get you accustomed to not letting your voice shake while doing harsh movements at that same time. That's really important. However I have to make it clear to you that being a soloist doesn't mean you'll get solos. Every year I choose three girls and three boys; this year luckily I'm choosing four because we have 32 spots in VA this year. It's the first time we had such a large group. Those eight people will be the ones I'll go to when I need to fill a solo. I can choose arbitrarily or hold an audition, it'll depend on time, and my mood… I don't know, it varies. All soloists however get one-on-one sessions with me weekly, so… that's something to look forward for. Or not. I hope it is."

"Definitively," he had stuttered after a few seconds, wondering what was about that woman that made his eloquence falter, even when she was babbling like a crazy person.

"Okay. Good luck, Jesse St. James."

She had offered him a head nod, and walked away, but he had called after her.

"The way you keep repeating 'Jesse St. James'…is it a joke?", he had asked sheepishly. Already he had badly needed her approval and he was sure that would never change.

"No. I love your name. I think it's the name of a star. Let's see if you'll do it justice, shall we?" she had smirked, but still that was something kind about it, and he could tell that her enjoyment was fairly harmless, even a little flattering. She had turned and walked away, her hips swaying inside a fitting pencil skirt in a way that made all male heads follow her down the path, her long raven hair pressed tightly into a ponytail that followed in the same hypnotic rhythm, and in that moment he had realized that Shelby Corcoran held a enthrallment over people, and of all things he had to learn from that woman, that was the very first priority. Of course, he would be lying if he denied that he had checked her out that day, but at least he had made sure to not let his crush get on his way to becoming her star, which was something he could not say for most straight guys in Vocal Adrenaline. They surely spent more time fantasizing about her than they did perfecting their vocals.

He had sailed through both auditions with a splash, of course. Dakota Stanley, at the time recently hired, hadn't found more than half a dozen of things to brutally criticize about his performance, and that was as good as it ever got with Dakota. Both members of the Booster Club Directive Board attending were fairly impressed by him too. But in the end, it had all come down to Shelby Corcoran, and in that end, it hasn't been just about proving his talents. It may have started with him wanting to show her he had honed his abilities and become exactly what she needed from a soloist, but by the time his audition was over Shelby and him had found something much more precious in each other.

Trust. He knew she was the one to trust his life to in order to achieve his dreams; he had no doubt that even the most trivial recommendation out of her mouth was gold and, her reputation aside, with her he was safe. And she knew that he would be the one faultlessly abiding by her every instruction, chasing her to the edge of a cliff if need be, and that in him she had a rock.

Though the early dynamics might have seemed like Shelby was the one allowed to play distant and not get caught personally into the relationship while he had invested his soul from the get-go, he knew that in time that had changed. His lack of boundaries was otherwise a problem, and Shelby was a very closed-off person, but he was so dedicated to her that he had eventually passed through her barriers. And he too had learned to see her as a little more than an idol, all mighty and untouchable. He had seen the care she had with every Vocal Adrenaline member and that could go unnoticed under the drill-sergeant act. And he had seen her mask fall enough times to learn that the woman was not purely made of talent, stamina and order. As a matter of fact she was quite the chaotic human being.

Which he knew was the reason Vocal Adrenaline was the way that it was. Shelby needed structure. And he hadn't run a poll through his company, so he couldn't speak for them, but he sure as hell was very thankful for it. He had tried the hippie experience with New Directions and found it seriously lacking, not only in drive but in a base. The idea behind it was quite cute, but coming from a family that was spread all over the place and a muddled lifestyle, he needed stability, routine, order, and Vocal Adrenaline provided with that safe haven.

He felt it was easy to work like New Directions did, and he honestly wouldn't be surprised if one day they actually won a Nationals title. In the end, show choir could be more subjective than they liked to pretend it was, but there was a startling difference between belonging to either group. New Directions was a school group to a fault; it was amateur, inclusive and it was supposed to be educational. Vocal Adrenaline might not have a professional status, but that's what they were and that's how they were treated.

Shelby made sure of that. They were expected to behave impeccably; even their funkifying only took place because it had been sanctioned long ago (though what happened to Rachel certainly crossed a line Shelby hadn't expected them to cross). And it wasn't a bad 'job' to have. Chris, who probably was going to stay in high school forever, was a statement to that. Shelby had made a deal that once he got accepted into college she would gladly pull some strings to get him graduated, even though he had a hard time adding up four plus four, but since he kept being rejected even at community colleges no one seemed in a hurry to kick him out. He was the only one that could do the triple flip, and Jesse didn't know many twenty-two year-old high schoolers who drove Range Rovers, wore designer clothes, had an Omega watch and traveled all around the country with all expenses covered.

Vocal Adrenaline put on usually two dozen performances nationwide in the period of a year; they participated in the main competition and two other parallel competitions, one of those having a $300,000 top prize from Pepsi they had, thankfully, managed to grab three years in a row. They held at least six invitationals a year at school and performed pro bono in benefits, fundraising and lots of corporate events. It was a lot of work. It was great for a resume of a future performer, and it certainly came with many rewards, but it required a commitment that was almost inhuman and that he felt most people couldn't understand.

It made it easier that Shelby was their commander-in-chief. She had a tough act, but she was soft for them. He had seen her once pay for Chris's grandmother meds from her own pocket (though, he guessed that, if Shelby could make the booster club pay for a shopping spree in New York with the excuse that the airline had extraverted her bag, which had not been true at all, she probably had found a way of making them refund her). She always received students in her office to talk about anything, even if she had work coming out of her ears. She was always understanding of personal problems, and she made sure everybody got checked for health issues, fatigue and stress after each gig. She was on top of their diets, their work-out schedules, their grades, their behaviors in class, how present their parents were in school life, and while she was demanding and didn't tolerate slacking or stepping out of line, she too worried if they ate too little, or worked too much, or didn't study enough. She was a slave-driver, but for many in the club, she was the person in their lives that took care of them the most. For him, who had always been bluntly favored, she had been more.

Which was why it had been hard to see Shelby so cold, disconnected, hard. He knew she was mad, but he had seen her furious before and it certainly hadn't come with that sense of unattainability that possessed her since the incident with Rachel. She just wasn't there for him anymore. Sometimes, for any of them. She was just there, hollow, giving out instructions and criticism. He felt that if one of them had broken their necks she might have rolled her eyes with boredom, or even that might have proven too much of an effort. It felt awful. It felt almost as she had died, or simply walked out, because they didn't have their leader anymore. They had some coach, a great coach, naturally, but not their mentor and idol.

He couldn't have imagined she felt that he didn't care for her. It was absurd to even think of that. But her offended tears, her meltdown, that hurt look in her green eyes, it evidenced that she really did believe it, and he wasn't sure how they had gotten to that point. At least, before that night. That night had really fucked it all.

He hadn't meant to harm her in any way. To remember her face, bruised and bloody, contorted in pain and fright, made his stomach twist like there were serpents in it. He realized the idea he had decided to set in practice once he had searched his mother car for chewing gum and found her work piece instead had been quite the foolish one. But he was an actor, and his life and her life were all drama, so maybe a little bit of a show would have done the trick to break her aloofness.

He had only intended to make her think he would play Russian roulette with himself unless she talked to him. It seemed harmless, because he had made sure to unload the gun properly, the bullet in the barrel included. Safety with guns was something his mother had been very adamant to teach all of them since there had always been weapons around the house. When they were little she had developed the habit of keeping her gun locked in her car, a habit she obviously hadn't lost, but still she had made sure Jesse understood the dangers of pointing a loaded weapon at someone.

He knew though that Shelby wasn't aware of that and had been incredibly frightened with the whole ordeal, and he felt terrible. It really wasn't something that he had meant to do at all. Nor was taking her hostage. The adrenaline of their argument, coupled with his massive screw up and then the presence of Mr. Baris had freaked him out, and he had only wanted to run and hide, like a scared little boy, but at the same time he had had to stop Shelby from getting him the punishment he so well deserved.

He tried to keep in mind what she had required of him and tried to put himself in her place. Even if everything had gone according to plan, what would he feel if she feigned playing Russian roulette with herself just to get his attention? He'd be horrified and then he would never forgive her. And if she physically assaulted him, threatened him with a weapon, shoved him into a vehicle, restrained him and driven him to an unknown location?

His stomach felt strangled into a knot and he had to rush to the toilet, thinking he would be sick, but unfortunately nothing happened and the sensation stayed with him. And then he felt himself sink into despair as he realized that she would not, in a million years, forgive him. He wouldn't if the parts were reverse.

Shelby was the one presence in his life that was reliable. He knew a lot of kids in VA had really problematic families. Cruel parents, absent parents, people that were just plain fucked up. It wasn't his case. His parents loved him, worshipped him, tried the very best to be supportive of him. But they were acid, cut and dry, and it wasn't easy to call his mother when she was between field operations to whine about how he was feeling lonely, and sometimes when he wanted to tell something that was on his mind to his father the words didn't come out of his mouth so effortlessly. He loved them, and he was conscious that they tried hard, but he couldn't honestly say that they were the best of friends. That he would bare his soul without trouble at home.

That was a piece of him he only had let Shelby have, and to a tiny extent, Rachel. Shelby always made him feel safe. And he knew that in a way, he had made her feel that too. He had made her feel that she could confide in him her darkest, most painful secret. She had learned to let her guard down and actually put into words when she was tired, sad, confused, anxious. And then he had learned to read all of that in her eyes, in the way she clenched her jaw and tensed her shoulder, in how many chocolate bars he saw her snacking on in a given week, even in the way she coached, and she hadn't needed anymore. They could talk silently, sometimes even give each other some support by merely crossing for a second in the hallway, or exchange an inside joke while he was all the way up the stage and she was sitting at her desk.

How would she do that with someone that had actually dragged her to the middle of the woods at gunpoint? How would she feel safe now? He knew that no matter how well he explained to her that he hadn't meant to hurt her, it wouldn't change the fact that he had done horrible things to her, and it wouldn't make it better. His remorse was better than nothing, he wasn't as she had put it: a monster, but he just didn't see how he could just erase what he had done. It seemed impossible.

At that moment he was the one who wanted to cry. But he didn't feel he even deserved that, so he bit back the tears and marched back into the room he had accommodated her in, his room, but she was still asleep and once he took a look at her he lost all courage to wake her up.

Even unconscious Shelby seemed very scared at that moment. She was curled into a fetal position, her arms raised before her face, as if to protect it, a tense expression over her pale and bruised features. She looked cold too.

Jesse went to the linen closet in the hallway and grabbed a few blankets. He hadn't known what he was doing when he got to his car, he just needed to get her away from Mr. Baris, because as soon as the older man found what he had done to Shelby he would be in heavy trouble, and then he had to admit he had gotten a kick of driving around, having her forced to be in the same place as him, and wanting to communicate with him, but being bluntly ignored, just like she had done with him.

But the punishment got despicable pretty fast; he could tell she was really terrified and he wasn't enjoying it. And he wanted to take her back, but considering the state of affairs, he dreaded that the first thing she would do would be calling the police, and he had wanted to at least buy some time to calm her down and properly apologize, not that he had succeed in that so far.

His family had been to the cabin just the week before and he knew the place was clean and stacked with linens, and since they intended to return soon, some bottled water and dry goods. He was sure there was some medicine in there too, plus the key had been on his mother key ring, so it had seemed a pretty convenient place to keep Shelby captive for a few hours. How he regretted that at that point. He thought about just scooping her up and rushing her to a hospital, but she actually didn't seem that critical, and he really didn't want to rob her from the rest she sure was needing at that juncture.

Jesse removed Shelby's stilettos and then sprawled two thin blankets on top of her body. It was a cold night for spring, especially where they were. Of its own accord, his hand went to her cheek, and his knuckles brushed it soothingly. Her face almost immediately relaxed a bit, and he couldn't help but feel that pressure in his chest loosen up a little too.

He also didn't approve but couldn't prevent himself from sitting on the edge of the bed, next to her. He just wanted to feel her; to feel the warmth from her body, the soft, floral perfume she exhaled. And if that could at least make her feel like she wasn't alone, like she was a bit protected, even if she was unconscious, it already made him feel better for the awful things he had said to her.

Shelby instinctively snuggled into him, and he felt bad for she didn't know what she was doing, but he kept caressing the side of her face, and then rubbing circles in her back, until she seemed somewhat peaceful. He knew he should be waking her in fifteen minutes or so, per her orders, but he felt he would be doing her more harm by not letting her rest a bit more, so he decided to go take a walk and meditate over their situation more thoroughly.

Shelby turned instantly into the spot he had vacated as soon as he got up, and it was almost too hard to leave her, but it was harder to process intense thoughts while having to quietly watch over someone's sleep. He couldn't pull away though, and he just got closer and closer to her, and eventually his face was so close to hers he hadn't been able to resist burying his nose into her hair, and as his lips touched softly the base of her skull, he felt a tear running down his cheek and down her neck. His body shuddered with a nervous energy that wasn't just pure sorrow, he knew, and he quickly straightened his body, more sickened at his behavior than never, and stumbled out of the room as fast as possible, rushing then outside and hoping the full moon and the fresh air would knock some sense into his head.

There was much to be questioned about his brief and disastrous relationship with Rachel. He knew some people, if there was anybody aware of the truth, might have found petty and irresponsible of Shelby to ask him to get to know the girl to see if maybe she would be open to an approach. He hadn't understood her fear at all at first, but the day she had explained it, she had looked so broken and vulnerable, he had seen that even trying to connect with that girl was frightening her to death.

And Shelby wasn't a person that he knew to be easily scared. Not much fazed her. And he knew her personal life enough to have seen a certain fragility take over her a few times. He learned that when she went missing in one of their trips or celebrations and came back with a hollow look in her eyes, that she had been making out with some gay or married guy that was just using her for a cheap thrill. He still didn't know why she allowed that to happen, she was a beautiful woman, and she knew that; and even if her life was Vocal Adrenaline there were a couple – not many, true, but they existed – divorced dads in the Carmel community that wouldn't mind trying to woo her. The risk of one of them just wanting the kick of possessing the ice queen was just as high, but at least she would be taking chances with available men. He had noted too that in certain weeks of the year she would give them really short rehearsals, then become distant and distracted, her eyes would become sadder and her smiles would turn fake. Jesse guessed those were periods when she had lost loved ones, considering Shelby was all alone in the world. He had already found out that one of them aligned perfectly with Rachel's birth. He had been there when she lost titles (it wasn't really true that Vocal Adrenaline won it all) and had baffling anxiety attacks. She was very demanding with them, but more so with herself, and failure did send her into disarray. But that look that she had in her car the day she told him the whole story, that air of pure misery, it had been new.

Shelby did carry an aura of loneliness and sadness, but she had a tight wall around it, and it was an efficient, tightly controlled one. Hell, it was even excitable and amicable. Once you got past her reservations, she wasn't that unfriendly, he saw her treating other people with affection quite often in the halls of Carmel. So he had never considered the possibility of her being actually an unhappy person. He couldn't help now but to want to reach out, to make it better somehow, to protect her from her life of constant disappointments. Instead, he had just become one more; with the abduction, more than ever, but surely it had already been the case before, with Rachel.

He didn't want her to think he was a bad human being; he hadn't taken the opportunity to gauge Rachel's life for her as a game. The situation just had been bizarre: finding out she had a teenager daughter that she had given up that not only surfaced before her eyes without any awareness that her mother was that close, but was also their freaking competition. He did love a little drama, he couldn't deny that. Living like a character on a Broadway tragedy or a Mexican soap opera did give him a thrill. But he did care that this girl seemed to be the only relative Shelby seemed to possess, and he had fantasized that Rachel could have been like one of those characters too, hollow without the love of a mother, depressed with her existence, and that he would lead her right into blissful happiness and save the mentor he idolized and adored from her life of abandonment and isolation (and jerks that used her for sex).

It wasn't like that at all. As soon as their relationship had moved into that phase where is okay to go to the girl's house and hang out with her, which had been pretty fast considering Rachel's equally expansive flair for exaggeration and for giving too much of herself, he had realized that Shelby might have been a little more realistic by dreading an approach than he had been. Rachel's dads were pretty doting and present. That relationship that he wished he had with his parents and that he had developed with Shelby instead, Rachel had with Leroy. She could just sit on the couch, or join him while he did the dishes, and tell him everything, or so she had confided. And any time she felt down, because of the bullying or losing a solo or a competition, she would just go after Hiram, even if he was at work, and he would find the right thing to say to her to bust her confidence and help her keep going.

She didn't seem broken. A little ill-adjusted at McKinley, but not more so than Jesse too would be if he had landed there instead of Carmel. She didn't seem like she would gladly run to Shelby, move in with her, give her the family he knew his coach so desperately needed. He still believed that they should at least be aware of each other, and was glad to see that immense weight moving from Shelby's chest, even though it had been a really troublesome experience. He had seen enough Lifetime movies to believe firmly that at some point they would gravitate back towards each other and find an organic way to bond, and develop a friendly relation from there.

His biggest issue probably had to be his true involvement with Rachel. He didn't expect to get a little infatuated with the girl, and he had been more disturbed by it than he had cared to show. After he had put his head down in San Diego, and then paid his brother a visit in college and for the first time ever held a conversation with him – Patrick was just out of rehab and full of emotions shit talk, but it had helped him – he had become conscious of two very grave things: the first was that he might have been transferring his high-school crush on Shelby to her age-appropriate, adorable, accessible daughter. His brother had come up with some very fancy psycho-babble about how he could be doing that to be able to settle with the motherly role Shelby played in his life without the major sexual attraction conflict that was plaguing his id, ego or whatever the fuck. Patrick seemed to be polishing the conversation to prove to him that the tuition money their dad was dispensing was being well availed, but Jesse was simply glad that his brother seemed able, for the first time in years, to do anything without going through uppers and downers like they were a Disneyland ride, regardless of how much Freud he was being able to soak up and spit back at somebody who only really needed some simple relationship advice.

The second thing, and the ickiest, was the fact that even if Shelby and Rachel were virtually strangers, embracing Shelby as kind of a mother and moving on to Rachel meant that he was using someone akin to a sister to placate a physical temptation that wasn't really complicating his relationship with Shelby at all. It hadn't got in their way, it hadn't hurt them. It was just an annoying detail hanging there, but after four years, he had even lost the instinct to check out her ass when she was walking in front of him. Respect had really trimmed the edges, and now what was left was just that urge to touch her, to cup her cheek or pull her into him when they were sitting really close and talking gibberish, and she was being cute and tossing that dazzling smile around. It wasn't as if he hadn't touched her like that; he had, plenty of times. But it had always been in times like that one, when she needed comfort so badly he knew even her sense of professional virtue wouldn't kick in.

He was still at a loss from how he had traveled to slowly falling for Rachel, even in the mist of all the internal controversy, and egging her on that parking lot. He knew that the only reason he did return to McKinley was because of Shelby's face when he had tentatively told her it was over, that Rachel and he had gotten into a fight and he wasn't comfortable anymore with that sham. He didn't tell her that it was because it felt too real, that he was too engaged; that she had been Shelby, except with promise, instead of unfeasibility, and then it had became clear that he didn't hold that sense of future for her, that realm of possibilities, and that had squashed the very foundation of what had made her desirable to him.

Hell, if he wanted to hit a brick wall, he might as well pursue Shelby. It would be just as frustrating, possibly more disastrous, but Shelby needed his love, attention and care a lot more than Rachel did, and she had already given him so much in those six years.

He had only gone back to finish what he had promised himself and Shelby to do; to give her a chance of getting acquainted with her daughter. That had involved stringing Rachel along, and he wasn't proud of it, but he didn't think it was particularly cruel. Rachel was as invested in their dating as he was; he was the rebound and the guy she was using to make Finn realize she was wanted. It probably had upset her more to be humiliated in front of the club as being wrong about his true intentions, and he did feel sorry for it, but she technically hadn't been mistaken. He hadn't wanted to destroy her and discard her, breaking her heart was never on the agenda.

Well, not until he got back to Carmel anyway. School spirit was genuinely an uncanny thing in Carmel. When he was with Vocal Adrenaline, even if he was their star, he felt like he was a part of something; something special. He was wholly loyal to them, surely more than to the girl he dated under false pretenses for the period of two months. He had had fuck buddies for longer than that. His confusing feelings aside, Rachel couldn't be considered very significant. Her ties with Shelby ignored, she wasn't Shelby and he didn't owe her anything. Egging her, considering her sensible lifestyle, was pricky, but he had done worse and Shelby knew that. He couldn't understand what the big whoop was.

Of course Rachel was Shelby's kid, and she had the right to feel more protective and offended about his transgression, but apparently it wasn't just that. If he had grasped it right, and he hoped that he did, she was under the impression that he didn't care. And thinking back he had to admit that refusing to apologize and trying to go back to normal might have let her feeling that he didn't give a rat's ass about how Rachel and her were feeling about the incident, which wasn't true at all.

He had meant what he had said to Rachel in that parking lot. He had loved her. He had loved her for what they could be, he had loved her for being an accomplice to him, and for listening to some of his silly problems and really giving a damn about them, and for laughing in that way that was so akin to Shelby's. Shelby had made him who he was, but that was coming to an end now; and maybe in Rachel he could have had another woman that would help him be great.

He didn't want to harm her because she wasn't. There could only be one Shelby; he had made a mistake trying to shift those expectations towards Rachel. And he was sincerely sorry to see her so vulnerable and hurt, but he cared about the integrity of his team more.

Jesse finally stopped and lifted his head. He had been wandering aimless through the woods, letting the cold air and the moon light be absorbed into his skin, but he had lost completely notion of the world around him, including the time. Concerned, he decided to turn around and tried to find his way back to check on Shelby.

He tried to walk steadily and watch his path, but his head was elsewhere, his fingers brushing the calloused trunks of the trees as he cut through them; the moon was bathing him through the leaves and he felt naked under it, observed. It was disturbing and consoling at the same time; after all, Jesse needed an audience to live, even if it was the stars. He gazed up at them, a plea never leaving his lips but shining through his eyes, and muttered the first thing that came to his mind.

_Waste away the days _

_Waiting on a new age_

_But time betrays me_

_And I get older one more year_

The melody was a little off, he knew. He tried to find his footing; on the ground too, and he inched closer to his house. But it came to him. And then it built inside of him.

_Walk Lima's windy streets_

_Go anywhere but home_

_Cause I'm looking for the secrets_

_That only cobble stones hold_

_Only the cobble stones know_

_And I've never been so sure_

_That after all these years, I'll never learn_

_That heavenly creatures never come_

Jesse stopped on the fringe of the woods, seeing her. She seemed like a vision, eerie. Under the light, she shone, mighty but so, so delicate, and he wanted to pull her into him and never let go, but he also wanted to punch her.

_You've got a knife-throwing kind of love_

_But your silence cuts the deepest_

_And I know I've made a mess of things_

_And I'm sorry for all that_

_Wish we could get the time back_

_'Cause I've never been so sure_

_That after all these years, I'll never learn_

_That heavenly creatures never come_

_But I wait for it_

_I wait for it_

* * *

><p><strong>AN: I know, I know. A song. Again. Eye rolls. I couldn't resist it. I'm addicted to Vanessa Carlton's new CD and I thought this song, _London_, was just so perfect for this. Especially that last part. I hope this musical thing I'm trying to pull isn't too ridiculous. But I do apologize because I hate songs in fics as much as anybody. I'm sorry this took so long, but I just want to say that I'll keep writing and updating and I'll see this fic through even if it takes a little while. I have a bit on my plate now, with graduating college and having to become an adult with a full time job, but don't ever worry I've given up on this. I would never post it here if I didn't intend to finish it. So, I'll ask for a bit of patience. It might take a while between updates. But I'm really committed to this story and fiercely looking for my inspiration since she seems to have gone missing lately. Critics and suggestions are always appreciated, and I love, love, love all of your reviews; I hope you know that. Whenever I'm in doubt as to why I do this, I reread my reviews. So thank you so much for all of your kind words. **


	3. Shoulder To Shoulder

**Mariella – **Thanks so much for your compliments. I think characterization is such an issue on Glee, and I try to write these people as complex individuals. In this fic, I'm leaning towards dark places for both Jesse and Shelby, but I need it to still feel like it's the people we saw on the show, you know? I hope I do a good job of it. Also, I'm trying to make it believable that, even though they are in a bad place and they can do crappy things to one another, there's love in their relationship. So I'm glad you responded to Jesse smelling her hair.

**Muriel – **Thanks for reading both of my stories! I know my style is not the easiest. Too much flourish sometimes… But I try to make the tone more emotional and write as if from my characters head, even if sometimes it hurts the flow a bit (my beta is great at picking up my slacks though. She really is).

**EmZ711 – **I'm glad you're enjoying it. And I'm truly sorry 'more' is always taking so damn long. But it's finally here. Yay.

**Lyra124 – **OMG, I'm not sure that's where your screen name comes from but His Dark Materials is one my favorite things in this life! I so would like to have in me to write a Marisa Coulter fanfic. End of rant. I'm so flattered and I totally feel I don't deserve this much praise. Plus, I feel guilty to have your heart in my hands because I feel I'm just about to crush it with this chapter. I feel like I must apologize in advance or something.

**Gabrielle – **I'm sorry I'm torturing you (I'm feeling so guilty answering these reviews. I'm gonna go hide in shame somewhere). I do not want to be the death of anybody. So here, new chapter. Yay. I hope it was worth the wait. I want to give you virtual hugs if it wasn't because I feel bad for you being so totally sweet to my writer-blocked ass.

**I usually respond to all my reviews through PM, but since I failed to do that since most days I arrive home feeling like my soul and energy have been successfully sucked out of my body, I have just been feeling tired and uninspired, and it's been hell to try and write. I really want to tell this story, but I feel like my excitement for this has been drowning amongst all the stressful stuff in my life. **

**Still, I have to leave a word for everybody that reviewed, because your comments always ignite the drive to keep going. It seriously helps me a lot. So thanks to all the one who did. And I miss all the ones who didn't, but I just hope everything is great on your lives and busy only in positive ways. **

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 3 – Shoulder To Shoulder<strong>

Shelby liked to think she wasn't a frigid person. She expected people to stay out of her personal space, and there was something about public displays of affection that just made her generally wobbly. It was ironic that she had chosen a dream career that basically required her to be willing to expose herself in the most visceral ways, to wear her vulnerability on her sleeve. But there was something about being on the stage, about being naked within a carefully controlled environment, about being blinded by follow spots and never facing the people she was denuding herself for, that made her feel safe. Real displays of affection carried within their rituals a heap of responsibilities. They made you vulnerable, and they sometimes held you hostage over misconceptions.

On that end, she would rather take her pick of words and songs any day. She liked being blunt, even while poetic. She liked to leave as little room for interpretation as possible. She didn't like to let people wonder about the meaning of a kiss or a hug, as she certainly hated to have to speculate herself.

But that didn't mean she didn't touch or let herself be touched. It was just a long way for her to get into that position of comfort in regards to somebody, and then there was the matter of circumstances. She would gladly hug every single one of her performers in a stage after a show or a win, but it was strangely harder to be so warm with any of them during a more private event. With Rachel, the decision between expressing fondness towards her daughter in that department had been palpably arduous, and in the end she had gotten only that one hug, which felt so insufficient, but anything else just seemed out of the imaginary line she felt push her away from the girl.

Jesse and she were a whole different matter. Shelby didn't know Heather St. James much; she had only met the older woman a couple of times and she seemed nice enough, if not a little hard on the edges and so quick-witted that she made Shelby herself look silly in comparison. She was very sober and withdrawn, but Shelby had never witnessed her having a problem laying her arm over her son's shoulder, or casually embracing him.

Jesse was thus very comfortable expressing himself that way, and maybe considering that moving back to Toledo to his much more collected father to attend Carmel had effectively left a gaping hole where his mother care had played a big part, he had easily latched on to Shelby, not caring much, in true Jesse St. James' style, if she could cope with that or not. Contemptuously, the more time Shelby had to get used to the notion that Jesse had little restraint pertaining to physical displays of friendliness, the more Jesse grew into a full man, and the more inappropriate it became for them to partake in such demonstrations. So they had developed a perfect measurement for body interactions, both in public and in secret. In a way, it was almost like their secret code. Their own language.

But whatever characters she had learned in these four years of being close to one another, Shelby found herself lacking the tools to easily process her state of affairs.

Her idiosyncrasies with Jesse were often borderline reprehensible, and troubling in a few different levels, but nothing that could have prepared her for the pit she had fallen in. Jesse's fingers on her cheek, his hand on her back… He had often comforted her in times of obvious distress, and a pat on the back was common, but maybe the conditions they were swallowed by had affected her.

Shelby had barely roused at first; the soft contact between his skin and hers had felt almost like an ethereal dream. The movements were hypnotic and soothing, and left little pools of warmth and a tingling of longing over her face and body. She could smell his almost departed perfume as he bent over her and the heat floating from him gave her goose bumps. It was inviting and sweet, and she wished she could just melt into the familiarity of him.

She had been navigating at the fringe of her consciousness; in and out, in and out. She craved to not lose the feeling of him, but at the same time, it was just too difficult not to let his caresses lull her into a murky peacefulness.

She sank into it, the darkness so heavy on her and so easy, and then it was as if the veil around her mind had been pierced by a thousand tiny specks, and she could vaguely taste the world around her, and it was cold all of a sudden. She was alone, the chilly air hugged her form under the covers, and she flinched against it.

But just after that she felt a feeble jolt of hot air blow through her locks and over her skull, and an electric shock pervaded her entire body and exploded into a burning, prickling sensation as his soft lips rasped the base of her neck, and her heart swelled with agony as his cold tear traveled from the edge of her jaw to her chin and his whole body quivered on top of hers. She could feel he was terrified too, and her mind went back to that little boy that was hers in so many ways, even as he most certainly did not belong to her at all, and she just wanted to hold him close and make everything better. She wanted to meet his breath, so warm on her skin, and breathe peace into him, even though she knew she was too not a peaceful person at all. But she didn't move, and then he was gone.

Shelby tried to go back to sleep but the veil had dissipated; she could keenly discern the rustic room that held her, with a sharpness that was cruel when all she longed for was to be oblivious. As she was thrust to arousal, she sensed the dull soreness on her face, and her back and shoulder felt as if there was sand being rubbed against the inside of her flesh, and an acute pain seized her entire head and strained the back of her eyes in a way that made it excruciating to keep them closed.

Shelby flapped her eyelids open tentatively, but even that wasn't enough. It was a full moon outside, and as Jesse had left the heavy curtains pulled back, the blue gloom struck her stridently. Her migraine intensified, fully agonizing then, and she jumped to her bare feet, surprised at her lack of shoes but not having any time to dwell on it, as her stomach clutched itself into a ball.

She staggered to the narrow hallway and examined it for a second, disorientated. There wasn't any distinct door that spoke clearly to her, so she just rushed through its length, pushing the doors open until she finally lurched into a bathroom. She let herself fall awkwardly onto the tile before the toilet, her knees complaining immediately about her recklessness, and she felt something bitter and oily burn inside her throat and choked on it. She honestly couldn't remember when she had last eaten, so it wasn't that surprising that her stomach was too empty to allow her to retch.

She remained on that position for a few minutes, cold sweats prickling through her pores as she tried to spit some of the bile, but finally she propelled herself up against the sink and splashed some cold water on her now uncovered face; she was grateful that her fretfulness had prevented her from producing some light, because she wasn't sure she was ready to confront herself in the mirror, but the shadow before her was still daunting. Her big eyes blinked back at her in the dusk, with a touch of misery and weariness she was more acquainted with than she would like, and she felt weak.

She scooped her hands together, gathering a shallow puddle of fresh water, and sank her face into it, holding her breath with all her might and hoping the darkness would just swallow her whole. She wasn't sure if it was tomorrow yet, but she wished the water would just wash yesterday away.

She released her air into her palms, her lungs meekly protesting against her masochism; she only wished she had the strength to be quite so histrionic, she could use the release, but instead, she closed the tap and without bothering with a towel, set out to locate Jesse. She already knew he wasn't in any of the accommodations, so she strolled straight to the living room, but he wasn't there or in the open kitchen attached to it.

She tried the door and shocked herself by being surprised it wasn't locked, but her brain wasn't quite sure which kidnapping assumptions it should be working with, and her feet brushed the wood in the threshold hesitantly, the limit between the house and the vast freedom of the outside almost intimidating, but at last she took two steps further.

The weather was as turbulent as her heart, and the wind blew the leftover drops of water into her eyes. She ambled around the house timidly, a little blind still, the moist dirt clinging to her soles. Apparently wherever she was, the weather was a lot more unstable and prone to storms than back at home, because she couldn't remember when it had last rained.

She saw the Cadillac still parked at a distance, meaning that wherever Jesse had gone, he had walked. She wondered for a second if she shouldn't be raging throughout the house after the car keys, even if to convince herself that she had tried, but then decided that it was enough to know that in her physical and emotional state, she would probably crash into a tree before she managed to figure out where she should be headed anyways.

She sat at the edge of the wooden floor of the porch and dared facing the moon once more. Her head was still mercilessly pounding, but it didn't take as much affront of her direct confrontation with light, and she found herself a little infatuated with the exotic orb. She felt bizarrely disconnected and connected at the same time, like the whole universe was embracing her despite the fact that she felt severed from its cloth.

She closed her eyes and let herself be calm until she was slipping into a daze like state, and in her reverie she let emotions flush through her, almost as if she could actually communicate them to whomever was out there looking out for her. She had her ideas, or at least her faith, and it was startling paradoxical for such a cynical person as her to pray as often as she did, but it was many times the only occasions in which she felt genuinely taken care of, and also it helped her to channel her chaotic thoughts. She sat there for what seemed like years though and she still couldn't convey her situation into one clear problem and beg God to make it better. Quite was her embroilment that she couldn't even find perspective.

It was grueling for her to try and comprehend how that nightmare had come about; she had been completely blindsided. However, that was the half of the relationship that had always come out with Jesse. The impulsive, spontaneous, unpredictable one. Once, she had been a hurricane herself; now, she felt very old, very tired, and very much conformed. Jesse was a breath of fresh air into her tightly controlled life; she had pulled everything in, hoping her failures wouldn't leak through her cracks. Jesse had seen her cracks right away, and near him she had learned to let everything burst through occasionally, even if it broke her whole self in the process; Jesse was good in pretending it wasn't all gruesome and scary, and being supportive from afar as she put herself back together. Hell, he had even glued a few pieces here and there.

She knew that their sick dependence cut both ways. She missed how he made her laugh, how he made her take herself and the world a little less seriously sometimes, and without that, she felt edgier. She felt more inclined to burst, and much more frightened about it. Being alone just didn't feel quite as easy and it used to be.

Jesse had worshipped the very ground she walked on; or so she had thought. Still, she might question the truthfulness of his feelings, but they hardly changed hers. She had felt wanted, cared for, adored. Her bitterness over him showing himself as such a self-absorbed jerk couldn't erase that; she wished they could.

And yet, as far as his actions supported her doubts, his hands, and his lips, and his body, and his eyes and his tear just challenged everything; they made her feel so wanted. Too wanted. It was ironic. She was a very lonely person, whom had craved to just be loved for her, not for what she could do or be to people, but just for what she was, Shelby Corcoran, in the height of its mess; and the wind stroke her face in a way that made her feel his knuckles instead, and she felt wanted so badly by Jesse, so much that he would take her hostage to not let her slip through his fingers, and she was terrified by it. But she longed it. She pined for his desire. And the entire thing was bewildering and overwhelming, and her head was reeling, and amidst that total pandemonium, she found her clearness. _Please God, I need peace_. _Bestow peace onto me, for otherwise, I might lose my mind. Please God, just give some peace. _

The pressure against her cheek grew full and solid, and Shelby jumped, her eyes ajar, and Jesse stood there, almost trapping her stretched legs, enough for her to feel him, but not to touch him, and her heart thumped hard, even though the scare promptly left her; the bruised side of her face was cupped into his smooth palm, and instinctively, she subtly leaned into it. Their eyes met in the dark, Jesse's face was obscured, placed against the moon, and she saw exactly the same in him as she had in herself on the dark bathroom, and it was sinister and comforting.

"Are you okay?" Jesse murmured apprehensively, breaking the moment, but she still felt rather withdrawn from the world to talk. Her hand came to rest on top of his, and she tugged at his arm, making him lower himself next to her. His fingers twiddled with her curls as if he was a little boy, and she kept his hand clutched inside hers, her brain struggling to reboot and reinitiate normal functions, until it did, and with nothing more than an attempted conciliatory smile, she unceremoniously dropped it. Him. And he looked quite fazed by it. Almost as if that mere motion had slaughtered all his hopefulness.

"I don't know if you'll ever be able to find it in your heart to forgive me…" he muttered, agony sipping through his every word in a way that made her a little sick. He may not be above harming her, but she found herself torn to pieces when he was hurting.

"I forgive you, Jess," she quickly amended, bluntly.

Jesse sought her gaze, an inquisitive stare probing for the "_but"_ he knew she wasn't voicing, but her only response was to stare at her lap and chew nervously on the inside of her cheek, an implied shrug left in the air. She didn't know how to explain that she couldn't simply erase the traces he left all over her body, all over her heart, documenting that whole transgression in detail. She could tell he got the picture nonetheless, just by the overpowering silence that plunged over them.

She sighed loudly, and decided to meet him halfway, if only to make things easier. He was, after all, just a kid.

"I shouldn't have said what I did at the office. It was cruel of me. And… you'll always mean something to me."

"Then why did you say it?"

"Sometimes, people have to go their separate ways, Jesse."

"Obviously, you haven't heard of e-mail."

His tone was cutting, outraged, and it made her take a deep breath and try and strategize. She really didn't want to argue their situation in circles, and it felt like they were about to go down the same drain.

Jesse had drawn his knees up and sort of hugged them, his fists clenching and unclenching the longer she opted for silence, his eyes blazing with resentment. She hated that person she was looking at; she really did. She let her fingertips graze the outline of his cheek bone softly, and he turned at her and stared her down, hard, and she only stared back, looking, searching for him.

"Where did you go today?" she finally whispered, more to herself than to him. A part of her still didn't think she was talking to Jesse.

"I'm right here."

He had answered dryly, and she only managed to shake her head, disagreeing, because she certainly couldn't find him. But then, wasn't she the one arguing that what they had once was lost, that they changed and he was going to become a man, and go away and have, hopefully, a beautiful life? She couldn't push him on his way and expect him to still be her Jesse. But she loved that Jesse; he wasn't perfect, he was certainly a little too arrogant and flamboyant, but he was endearing to her. She had expected him to blossom into a decent, toned-down young man. This was the wrong direction altogether. She couldn't cope with him turning into someone so self-entitled that he could easily be pushed into being cruel.

She once again let her hand fall down and closed her eyes for a minute, because she had found something that she needed way more than peace. She needed to be able to fix this. To fix him.

She heard him sigh, and then his hand gently took place at the top of her head, but then it just scraped slightly the bump she had gotten, and it made her flinch. Still, she looked up at him, waiting.

"Look, I know I made all the wrong decisions with Rachel. I didn't think clearly when I decided to pursue a fling with her; I didn't know she would take things quite so seriously. I know it's not the excuse you want to hear, as her mother, but I had millions of those flings. No one gets too hurt. It took me a while to realize how ostracized she was at school, and how much having me interested in her mattered, but you have to understand that it wasn't just in the innocent way that you, as her mother, wants to believe it was. She loves somebody else. She may have been invested in our relationship, but the whole thing was more about upping her social status and reassuring her self-esteem than it was about a genuine hope on her part that she could build something with me. I put myself before her, and I continue to do so. So does Rachel. We are just not going to agree on this matter; you're her mother, and you get to feel more guilt and contempt on her behalf. I'm not going to argue with that, but can you please stop demanding of me something that is nonexistent? I liked her, but what we had was just… not right."

"Okay," Shelby agreed, trying to be fair. She really did want to see Rachel as a perfect girl, and there was not much Jesse could say that would blemish it for her. Rachel might not be her kid, but Shelby still felt that strange claim over whom she was, and even though Jesse was much more her creation than Rachel ever would be, it was hard to reverse the roles in her head. It was impossible to villainize Rachel; especially when she had sent Jesse on the girl's trail with dubious intents and when he had ended up egging her. Whatever Rachel had done to break Jesse's heart, or at least bruise his ego a bit, what they had done was escalated way out of proportion.

But Jesse was, perhaps, right. She couldn't force him to mend the situation to appease her own remorse. Even if she had ignited the whole blaze, in the end, it was his relationship. Of course, they had moved way beyond that quarrel by now. Now, it was truly all about them.

The silence lingered between them; she wasn't sure if he expected more of a reply from her. She turned to him, trying to convey silently that she was willing to bury that hatched, and he took an extra round of breaths, as if preparing another complicated explanation. She tucked her feet under her body, and patiently waited.

"You are right that I wasn't thinking about you… In the office, I could feel your heart beating so fast as I had that gun on you, and I could only think I needed to get you to a place where I could talk you down from basically ruining my life; as if I hadn't done that myself. But then we were in the car, and you begged me to let you go, and you sounded so helpless and frightened, and I couldn't imagine how horribly you must have been feeling not knowing where I was taking you, and not being able to move, handcuffed to the fucking door, and God only knows how much injury I caused the many times I hit you, and you must have been in more pain than you are letting on. So I almost did let you go. But I had no idea how to go about that, honestly. So I just kept going. I'm sorry."

She heard his voice crack, and watched as he tried not so subtly to hold back tears, and her stomach was twisting in a bad way. She just wanted to stop it. She would do anything to take his pain away, really. Even if his pain was brought out by trying to understand her pain. Even if that had been exactly what she had begged him to try and do for a change. She just couldn't stand it.

"It's okay," she whispered reassuringly, caressing his arm. "We both were out of line."

Jesse stared at her with a look of pure incredulity, and surely she wanted to slap herself after hearing the words that came out of her mouth, but the fact that even he was dismayed, made her a little disgusted at the lines of reasoning her heart was willing to exhort to shelter him.

"Out of line? I smashed a door into you! I backhanded you. I threatened you with a gun to keep you quiet. I…" His eyes roamed through her, and she felt self-conscious, knowing that in her shape, she probably looked quite vulnerable and victimized. Jesse's fingers went straight for the contusion she knew was blooming under her cheek bone, and even in the dim light the sorrow is his eyes was all too poignant. "If you came to school with that, and I knew somebody else had abused you, I'd want to kill the person."

Shelby thought that now he was the one that was muttering more to himself, but she couldn't just pretend that she wasn't there, and when his eyes became laced with stabbing pain and horror, she squeezed his hand fiercely, not wanting to let go.

"You are right. I don't know where I have gone today. That wasn't me."

Jesse removed his hand and braced himself in a way that made him look very child-like, and then started slowly rocking back and forth in a manner that left her disgruntled and disturbed. She wanted to shout at him to stop, but knew that it wouldn't accomplish anything good, and might send them spiraling into an even more concerning place. She felt the seconds tickling by, agonizingly slow, or maybe Jesse was just doing that for hours indeed.

Either way, after a few minutes they reached a point where she felt she might start pulling her hair. Jesse's expression had transformed into one of deep revulsion, and his lower lip was trembling, and she couldn't take it anymore. She flung herself onto him, letting her arms take him into her, embrace him and try to pacify whatever demons he seemed to be battling in his head.

"Jess, please, talk to me," she begged in his ear.

"I was just trying to… put myself in your place and relive this…" he gestured a little wildly, and it shrugged her off, but she clung back to him and when he finally turned to look at her, they were actually only inches away from each other. She could feel his breath on her mouth, and his haunted gaze pierced right through her.

"You must have been so frightened." His voice was so dejected and caring, it was hard to associate it with the fact that he was expressing compassion over something he had done. It was hard to keep leveling with those eyes, and not want to let him take her into his arms instead, and cry out that indeed she had been so terrified, and could he please hold her until she felt safe again. "You still are, aren't you? Scared? Of me."

Shelby finally let go of him; she needed to give herself some space. She was starting to feel too exposed and fragile.

"Not so much, anymore," she at last came up with the courage to confirm, or halfway confirm his suspicious.

"But still, right?"

He kept pressing, and she had no idea how to unravel the amalgam of feelings that were rushing through her, so it took her a while.

"Jesse, I don't know where I am. I hit my head, and I don't feel well. And I don't wanna be here. I wanna go home. I have… stuff in my mind right now, and I'm being forced to stay in some mysterious house of yours in the middle of God-knows-where, and you used a gun to secure me here."

Jesse only groaned in a desperate way and buried his head onto his knees, and she really felt ill-equipped to deal with his breakdown while she was experiencing one herself, albeit much more layered and down-paced.

"It wasn't loaded, okay?" he murmured into his legs after a while, and even though she had heard him fine, she felt compelled to make him repeat, because the whole thing sounded startlingly like a bad hallucination.

"It wasn't what?"

"I wouldn't point a loaded gun at you. Of course, if somebody asked me two days ago if I'd ever point a gun at you, period, I'd laugh to their faces, but I really, really didn't take that thing into school to use it against you, and even as I decided I needed to use it to keep you quiet lest I wanted Mr. Baris to kill me, I wouldn't have if I thought it would be dangerous to you. I wouldn't put you in risk. I know you weren't aware and that you were terrorized, so I know it doesn't make it better, but just know that I would never – even crazy, unable to think, desperate as I was – put your life in danger by pointing a loaded weapon at your head."

Shelby gaped, truly dumbfounded at the latest development in that bad daytime soap opera her night was turning out to be, millions of things cursing through her head. The first was utmost relief. And the second was a new wave of goodwill towards Jesse, even if it was bit twisted and contrived, knowing that he hadn't, and wouldn't, endanger her life. The third was blind fury. How could he bluff with such a gruesome set-up? She had never felt so much fear in her life.

"Why the hell did you have a gun on you anyways?"

Jesse hesitated, chewed on the tip of his thumb anxiously, and then looked at her in a way that made her predict that she was not going to appreciate the truth. However, she wanted it anyway, and she raised her eyebrows to convey as much.

"I was gonna use it on myself. Pretend to use in on myself. Just to… persuade you to listen to me."

Shelby didn't know if there was a remainder of explanation and she didn't care. She was on her feet and charging away from Jesse, not even caring to ponder that she might want to press the issue, if not for anything else, for her later peace of mind. Not knowing was the worst to cope with. Not understanding how someone you loved could do appalling things was probably as thorny as it got. However, her fury had just blazed through her, making Shelby jump on her feet and demanding her to put some distance between Jesse and herself.

Her legs directed her inside for whatever reason, when obviously running astray into the woods that seemed to harbor the St. James' little haven would have endowed her with more space, more time, less claustrophobia. But she was blind with rage and common sense had not returned to the building yet.

She heard the living room door smash against the frame, and then the door of the room she had been put in crash even more thunderously. The whole hurricane she was wracking on the unsuspecting house felt like a distant event altogether though, and maybe because of it, had hardly been enough to consume her wrath.

Her head spun wildly around the room, somewhere from behind her incensed trance seeking anything that would serve as a scapegoat; it had been a long time since she had indulged in hurling blameless inanimate objects against walls but she reminisced it used to work well to both drain the destructive force building inside of her and to snap her out of hysterics. The room was quite barren though, and in a spark of complete mental breakdown she flung her right leg against the wooden wall, pain immediately shooting through her and making her crumble to the ground.

Shelby hugged her leg, trying hard not to cry out from the excruciating pain, and only then reminding that happened to be the same unfortunate limb she had already clashed against her coffee table. It had been a stupid, stupid thing, even if she hadn't been on rein of her actions at all; even if it had actually worked and she could actually feel the fire subsiding inside her.

Of course Jesse had to choose that moment to walk in. Not two minutes later when she would have been calmer, or five minutes later when she probably would have been taken over by the unbearable feeling on her injured leg, and wouldn't have enough adrenaline anymore to break his neck. As it was, she could still easily succeed on it; wounded animals tended to be all the more dangerous, even more so, she imagined, if they could experience the insurmountable feelings of betrayal and outrage that were searing through her.

"You are an idiot," she sneered through clenched teeth, noting that without the effort her jaw would almost certainly start quivering from the anger.

"I'm aware."

Jesse's reply was sober and too unaffected for her taste, but she quickly remembered his state just minutes before and managed to force herself into quiet gratitude over the fact that her loss of control had given him a newfound grip on himself. She could still question however his blatantly stupid decision to sit right next to her when her breathing hadn't evened back to human levels yet and she was sure her eyes were blistering with murder.

"What you were going to do Jesse is way, way worse than anything you have done to me so far today," Shelby was struggling so much to get the words out she might as well be stuttering, but her frayed panting wasn't allowing her much speech sharpness. She might as well be screaming, but there was not enough air in her lungs for that. "Do you not have any idea how much remorse and horror and despair I would feel thinking I had pushed you into a state of mind where you would consider hurting yourself?"

"No!" Jesse shouted with exasperation, and when their eyes met she couldn't get past the fact that she could actually see him doing something against himself just to frighten her and it disturbed the shit out of her. "Don't be surprised, Shelby. You are not the only one who thought the other didn't care. I had to see if you still gave a damn, because it surely didn't feel like you did."

Shelby sensed her heart wrench and thump with acid guilt. All the time she spend self pitying about Jesse's narcissism, she hadn't spared much thought to how her complete disentanglement from him would cause him the same feelings of abandonment that had been depressing her so much. How could she have been so self-centered herself? She had been saddened and befuddled, but her attempt to pass an eraser over a six-year relationship in order to wrap it up with the least suffering had been, too, in a way, cruel.

She was the person that needed to flee and gather herself when she was overwhelmed, that needed to hole up and lick her wounds, and Jesse was… Jesse. Jesse needed proximity; he needed physical comfort, and an attentive, sympathetic audience to his vents, and assurance that he was loved and supported.

She had condemned Jesse for being egocentric, and he certainly was, but she had been too. She had been incredibly self-centered, her sense of self-preservation kicking in and trying to protect her from losing Rachel and Jesse both at once with the same intensity he was trying to protect himself from it. And they both had lashed out. In that they were very similar too, except Shelby would always lash out on herself. Jesse was, if way more inconsiderate, at least also more practical. Her self-deprecating resignation towards the situation hadn't achieved more than hurting them both too. In a way, they were both victims and perpetrators.

Shelby had curled into herself, her closed eyelids buried into one of her palms. She felt so ashamed she couldn't bring herself to face Jesse. Still, two wrongs don't make a right. She knew that her whole rhetoric, or lack thereof, was based on the firm belief that eventually they would both be fine. Better, even. Time and other relationships would fill the void they would leave in each other's lives, and fix what they had broken along the way. All of that conviction would have been washed away from her instantly if Jesse had threatened to hurt himself. In a cold light, it was clever. In her soul, it was perverse. She just could not cope with that responsibility.

She felt Jesse's hand close around her knee and flinched. As much as she now wanted to embrace him and apologize, and hopefully find a solution to their difficult predicament, she still wanted to slap him just as badly.

"Don't touch me," she whispered coarsely, trying to caution him into not getting himself killed; perhaps if he survived the next few minutes things might even start going in his favor.

"What am I supposed to do then?"

He asked, half desolate, half really pissed in a way that of course was rubbing sand on both of her dilemmas. She had no idea how he managed to make her sympathize with him more and aggravate her horribly at the same time; it had to be a gift. She knew what he meant; this was all Jesse knew. When words failed, he sang; when music failed, he went physical to express himself. He caressed, he touched, and well… he apparently got aggressive too. Reaching for her was his way of trying to express how vital she was in his life, she saw that. But she neither felt deserving of his affections nor quite ready to reciprocate.

"Am I _unforgived_ now?"

"That's not a word."

Shelby heard him sigh, annoyed, but she didn't look up. If anything she curled tighter into a ball. Her leg had been throbbing the whole time, but after Jesse had touched her it was like he had magically unlatched a gate, and the hot, raw feeling had spread all over her entrails, making her feel as if her flesh was boiling from the inside out.

"Shelby, tell me what to do. Or at least, do something. Say something, scream at me if you have to. Slap me. I'll even turn the other cheek. Please."

Shelby groaned at how preposterous Jesse's appeals were building up to be, but then she realized she was doing it again. She couldn't deal with the situation, so she was withdrawing into herself, and it had to be distressing him.

She sat down straight, leaning against the wall besides him, which made their shoulders meet, but she didn't pull away. She could feel his gaze heavy upon her, demanding. But she was drained, and she had nothing to give.

"How can you not realize that we are both better off drifting away from each other, Jess? We are toxic together. We bring out the worst in each other."

She had whispered aguishly, the effort to even disclose something so emotional consuming her even more, and her eyelids fluttered close for a brief moment. Jesse jumped next to her and before she had even reacted to that, he had kneed across from her, both of his hands grasping at her tights and startling her.

"We also bring out the best!"

Jesse's tone was forceful, almost as if he hoped intonation would suffice to shove that down her throat. It brushed right past her, in all honesty. She had been more taken with his hands; a part of her wondered if she should move them from her, but in the end she had just cupped them inside her own.

"Yes, we do, Jess," she agreed lightly, looking into his eyes once and for all. Her thumbs were absentmindedly brushing his hands, and his palms started stroking her sides up and down, and she damned herself and Jesse for making both of their lives such an intricate shit mill that she was in no position to just give in, when that was all she wanted to do. "But all the beauty, and the success, and human character improvement in the world doesn't balance out the unreasonable amount of destruction we instigate. And now we are this close to destroying each other!"

"Only because you are trying so hard to shut me out. I can't simply let it go, Shelby. You are one of the most important people in my life, if not the most important. How can you just flip a switch and not love me anymore?"

Shelby draw a deep breath for patience, even if Jesse's needy little boy eyes broke her heart, his manipulative immaturity got on her nerves.

"I still love you." She made sure to clarify quickly, though the confession felt weighty on her tongue. If the night had only been really, really short of becoming a tragedy of epic proportions – she could still picture the images her head had conjured of something going horribly wrong with that gun and her lying in a pool of her own blood, both of their lives terminated because of stubbornness and recklessness on both of their parts – she couldn't deny that at least they had indeed come a long way. They had started the day thinking the other had never really loved or cared for their happiness. Now they were on the other side of the curtain altogether.

Their previous scenario was easier on them though. Grieve, accept, move on. That was a clear path of action. She had no idea what to do with Jesse right at that moment.

"And you are just gonna rationally discard me? Because you can't live with this gray, dark, whatever situation over your head? You are gonna tidy everything up, rein in your emotions, numb yourself?"

Shelby shook her head, frustrated. If only it was that easy, if only she could just settle down for a chaos of life and have him instead, then that whole mess probably wouldn't be tearing her apart.

"You are going to fucking California. And I have…"She wondered if she should mention Beth, but she wasn't sure dropping the 'I adopted a baby' bomb would do them any good. A kidnapping was probably more than they could handle to begin with, "other things I wanna do with my life. And this is twisted, and insane, and bad for the both of us. We have a chance of doing better, Jesse. Then maybe, a few years from now, when we do become better people, we can be friends."

That sounded almost silly, like those pledges high school sweethearts make when they have to move apart. Then, they effectively grow apart and it's over. She told herself she was lying to Jesse, to appease him, but she knew she was trying to placate her own inconsolable heart too. Wouldn't it be wonderful if five years in the future, when he had actually become a man and she had become a much, much better person, less lonely and reliant, they could be in each other's lives again? Maybe they just had a timing issue. Either way, they certainly had issues, and they weren't going to go away at that moment. She couldn't look through them, walk around them, forget them. She couldn't see the exit from their situation. She felt like they had reached that dreadful point in a relationship where you just can't stop hurting the person you love anymore. Where you just can't find the happiness.

"But right now, it's just a terrible idea. I can't. I'm not a monster; I don't wanna be a monster, Jesse. All that happened with Rachel, and with me today, I can't help but to know I somehow molded you into this. I took that sweet, dreamy little boy and I turned him into this, and it makes me sick. I robbed you of your innocence and taught you to be ruthless and selfish, I got you involved in my private problems, and it all bit me back in the ass and it's fine. But I don't want this for you. You deserve better, to be better."

"I rather feel anguish, and misery, and distress, than not feel anything at all. And so do you! You feed on drama!"

Shelby felt Jesse's grip on her legs increase in pressure to the point where it bothered her, but she didn't want to lose her composure when he was so obviously not able to keep his.

"That's true, but it's not alright either."

"Shelby, us without passion would be what? Where would humankind be if we decided to all be zen and better, and fucking blasé and aloof? I'm scared to find out I'm capable of doing such extreme things, but the bad comes with the greatness."

Jesse was talking so close to her face now, it made her feel trapped. It wasn't scary, just bothersome, and it made her get his hands off her with an exasperated brush and tug closer to the wall to try and create some space to breathe.

"See? You are talking like me, and you are defending the fact that you just committed crimes that could land you in jail for the rest of your youth! You need to realize that things have gone too far."

Jesse jumped on his feet and briefly paced a small path back and forth, before turning and towering over her, and Shelby felt incredibly small at that moment.

"Maybe. But I'm not pulling away. I'm not, Shelby! I'm not giving you up, even if I'm thousands of miles away, I'm not letting you turn your life to the equivalent of watching beige paint dry, because that's just bullshit. You might as well be dead. I'm not letting you kill your soul."

Shelby had to resist the temptation to smack her head repeatedly against the wall, but what favors would another concussion do her? It was cute, and almost too flattering that he wanted to save her from herself. It made her love him all the more. But it was maddening. Shelby would never be able to appreciate anyone else trying to govern her life. She was too independent and pigheaded. If she wished to be self-destructive, she was going to be god damned self-destructive!

"If I want to, I have the right," she seethed, glaring at him in a way that usually had people flying to get out of her way. Jesse had taken two steps back from her, conditioned to respond to it, but he was obviously feeling bold because he otherwise didn't cower.

"No, you don't."

"Yes, I do!"

Shelby jumped on her feet, frustrated, but aware that any demonstration she had wanted to pursue of self-assurance wouldn't do with the manner she had promptly swayed on her feet. Jesse scattered close to steady her, but she shoved him away, sulking from the idiotic turn they both had pushed each other towards.

"I'm gonna win either way, you know? You can't force me to interact with you at school, even in VA, and especially after you leave for LA, and you can't keep me here forever."

Shelby listened to herself and thought she sounded downright infantile. It was the exact opposite of what she wanted; she truly would rather talk and figure things out for themselves. But he was grating on her good judgment.

"Yes, I can. Don't underestimate how easy it is to make a person disappear, Shelby; my mom is an FBI agent, I know how. Nobody knows you've been taken. By the time they realize, they won't be able to find you. If somebody even cares to try and find you. Maybe Mr. Baris, because he always had a huge crush on you, but he is a family man; it's not like he can devote himself to finding a mere missing teacher. You can't escape, and don't test that theory, because I still have the bullets for that gun. If you are not going to cede even a little bit, neither am I."

Shelby knew she was gaping and that her body was pressing against the wall as if it was possible to blend into it, something she would actually be thankful for, but she couldn't pull herself together. She couldn't believe Jesse's nerve. She just really couldn't fathom how he could dare to threaten her. After all the tears, the heartfelt apologies, the little shit was trying to terrorize her.

Of course, he was succeeding, to an extent. She sensed her right hand nervously shaking, and clenched it into a fist and shoved it behind her back. She knew her whole body would follow soon, and that she wouldn't be able to contain it. When she was extremely emotional or frightened or furious, her body trembled. She was, of course, feeling all those things at that very moment.

She had no idea what he was trying to mean with "disappear" and she didn't want to find out. She felt her conviction in him falter, wanting to shun completely the idea that he might even consider doing something so perverse to another human being, let alone her, but not being able to. She couldn't convey that he wouldn't grasp by now that even insinuating that he would keep her captive was cruel. They had just engaged in that conversation; he had, just ten minutes before, pushed her to acknowledge that she was afraid of him. How could he be so insensitive to use that new discovered weakness to subjugate her?

Jesse's expression was a mixture of remorse and determination. She could see he felt bad for saying it, but he wanted to keep the threat on the table. He took a tentative step towards her and she pressed her back harder against the wall, not that it was helping. If anything, it was probably making her look even more like an easy prey.

Jesse held up both of his hands, in a pacifying gesture that didn't soothe her anxiety at all, but at least he didn't try to get closer. She felt like she was inching closer and closer to snapping, and him cornering her would be the last straw.

"Shelby," he whispered as if he was talking to an ambushed, fearful animal, which she felt was in many ways fitting, "please, come and sit down."

Shelby crossed her arms in front of her chest defiantly and raised her chin to maybe remind him that he was the kid, and he was not going to talk to her like she was a helpless little thing, no matter how indeed defenseless and terrified she was feeling.

"Bite me, Jesse!"

She realized that confronting him like that was the wrong move; it hadn't paid off before and she knew it wouldn't then either when Jesse's eyes hardened, but he kept pushing the button that was responsible for her self-respect, and she kept trying to clung to the very last bit of dignity she had available, even if there was absolutely no glory in acting hostile. Jesse started backing away towards the door, as if he was planning on locking her in there and her heart hammered inside her chest.

"Jess, please, just let me go home. Please."

Her submissiveness surprised him for a second and he stopped on his tracks as he seemed to take her miserable plea into consideration. Then, his brain probably processed that she was begging him to do the exact opposite of what he intended to be doing, and that her meekness was not giving in enough, because he kept going for the door.

"Jess, don't! Please!"

Shelby's legs were sprung to action and she darted so hastily she actually reached the door at the same time as Jesse. They both tried to squeeze themselves out of there at the same time, and of course, got stuck because the door frame was too small for two struggling bodies. She was smaller though, and she slipped right into the hallway, but Jesse grabbed her by the back of her shirt.

"Didn't I warn you to not try to escape, Shelby?"

Jesse hissed on her ear, his hot breath making the hair on her neck stand up. She turned to him, both of her arms trying to grasp his hand and make it let go of her blouse, unsuccessfully. She realized she could have used her shoes at that moment, but still, she kicked his knee, hard, and it made him stagger enough for her to effectively push him into the door.

"You'll have to shoot me then," she muttered, irate, before rushing towards the living room. Her mind was reeling and it was difficult to reason, but her instinct was urging her to find the car keys, because there was no way she was making it out of that place on foot. The living room was as simple as "her" room, but even with the lights on, she couldn't place the set of keys. She rummaged through the couch, throwing pillows away and even crouched on the carpet for a second before rushing into the kitchen and examining the counter, but there was no sign of the metallic glow and she felt her stomach drop.

"Looking for this?"

Shelby whipped her head around and saw Jesse leaning against the entrance of the kitchen holding her means of escape and wearing a rather smug smirk. She had been amazed that it took him so long to catch up with her, but now it was clear that he had no reason to hurry at all. She was indeed entrapped, at his mercy. But she surely wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of begging anymore.

Her bare soles moved backwards subtly on the wooden floor, but she knew Jesse was going to notice that she was moving towards the kitchen door soon; she was just trying to gather even the most minimal advantage before she tried to make a break for it.

"Shelby, let's be reasonable. Come and sit on the couch. We can talk."

"I have nothing to say to you anymore."

Shelby sprint as fast as she could, but Jesse managed to seize before she even touched the handle. His arms closed around her waist like iron and he lifted her off the floor, and started to drag her trashing body back. He appealed "Shelby, stop struggling, you are gonna make me hurt you again" in a tone that was almost gentle, but she was beyond the point of appeasement. Her legs aimed back, fruitlessly, but her arms did so too and her left elbow punched Jesse in the gut, knocking the air out of him and making him drop her.

Shelby sort out how to pry the door open, even though Jesse was crouching behind it and blocking it. She reckoned she probably did hurt him in the process, but while her heart occupied itself with that, her legs swiftly carried her away from the house. To where, she had no clue, but it hardly mattered because before she managed to reach the outskirts of the woods, she was tackled to the ground.

Shelby tried to cough out some air. She hadn't downright collapsed against the floor; she had actually been lucky that her body had reacted fast and she put her weight on her knees and elbows, so she didn't have another concussion or something of the sort of an internal bruise to worry about, but the impact had left her body shocked anyway. It didn't help that Jesse's much heavier body was crushing her.

Shelby tried to pull on her hands and dislodge him, but Jesse grabbed both of her wrists and twisted them behind her back, forcing her chest against the dirt ground while he handcuffed her. Shelby made herself turn her head in a way that made all the muscles in her neck strain and faced him in the dark. She was sure though that her eyes were so wide with fear he could see them just fine, just like she could see his clouded and set ones, the same way they were when he had taken her against her will back at Carmel.

She felt herself shudder under him, a strangled "Jesse" dropping out of her mouth; it was intoned more as a warning then a begging, she knew he was about to cross a line that he would regret crossing, and afterwards her forgiveness might be a moot point. She wasn't sure if he wasn't going to end up doing something that would prevent him from being able to live with himself. Before she could further preach him on the likeability of a tragedy however, Jesse forced a piece of cloth over her eyes and fastened it around her head. She gasped, but her terror was beginning to escalate in such fashion she couldn't bring herself to do much more.

"You wanna take a midnight walk around the woods? Why Shelby, I'll be glad to oblige you," Jesse whispered in her ear, and she shook her head with as much vehemence as she could muster, but he gripped both her arms and pulled her to her feet, and then forward, anyways.

Shelby could feel the ground change under her feet; the dirt was drier, probably because of tree coverage, and she was stepping onto leaves and twigs. Probably insects too, and she tried not to dwell on that, but as soon as her brain had registered she started to feel things crawling at her, little legs on her skin. _You are imagining it, Shelby, it's all your imagination_, she forced herself to remember again and again, but then she felt a small burning sensation on one of her toes and jumped, screaming in an exaggerated manner. Something had most definitively bit her.

The woods were chilly and windy, and she started to shake harder. It felt like having ice rubbed against her skin and it didn't help that she was barefoot and the ground was cold. Jesse kept pushing her and turning her, and she wondered if they were just walking in circles so he could fuck with her. It hardly mattered. She was disoriented and anxious, and the constant whirling while blind was making her dizzy. She knew she had promised herself she wouldn't beg Jesse again, but she couldn't help herself.

"Please, Jesse, it's enough."

She heard Jesse snort behind her and then hold her tighter when she entangled her foot on a tree root and tripped. It was the worst thing, feeling like you going to fall when you can't see and your hands are restrained. It was like one of those Freudian crooked nightmares.

"This is gonna be a great acting exercise, Shelby. Trust me," he finally replied, and his voice was so jovial and yet snickering, it made her sick. How could he be taking pleasure in what he was doing to her? "It's a good alternative to the Russian roulette I never got to do for you. You are not going to enjoy it, but I suppose that's the point. To be enlightening. Think of this as walking through life alone, without having even one person to care for you. Without having me."

Shelby scoffed and wriggled a bit inside his grasp. She wasn't really trying to get loose, just to feign some resistance. "You know you are only proving my point, right?"

"Yes, but I'm also living to my recent promise. If you don't give, neither do I. We'll both cave a little, or this is just not going to end anytime soon."

Shelby huffed, but even her fake haughtiness deflected her quite quickly when she felt Jesse's hands remove themselves from her. She waited to see what would happen next, but literality nothing came to be.

Shelby carefully rotated her body in the direction Jesse had just been a second prior, but she couldn't feel the heat emanating from him or his perfume, and it irked her. She knew he had to be there, he was just trying to scare her. So she stood still. She closed her eyes. She tried to remember her breathing exercises from yoga. She even let herself relax and meditate.

However, after what surely had to be hours, she was bored and aggravated. She opened her eyes again but the blindfold actually made her swoon where she stood, and the lack of balance freaked her out. She knew she was standing solidly on her two feet, but now she felt herself falling to the sides, unable to stop herself, to catch herself with her hands tightly bound as they were and she got a little panicky.

The sensation that bugs were crawling all over her was back, and she started raising her legs harshly, which made the sensation of falling even more pungent. She tried to spy under the blindfold, but then a circle of blue light started expanding and contracting in front of her eyes, and then it was black, and then both, and she just had had enough of it.

"Jess, whatever you want me to do, I'll do it. Just please, take the blindfold off."

When Jesse didn't respond, Shelby's mind didn't even bother concocting that it might all be still part of his play. She was afraid he was gone. That his move was leaving her there and her panic escalated exponentially, times a million.

She pulled against the handcuffs, trying to slid her hands through it, but they were tight and it felt like they were dilacerating her wrists. She didn't stop pulling. The lights were dancing faster in front of her eyes, and now she was sure she could hear the insects creep up her skin, sucking at her and injecting her with poison. She didn't even know if she was allergic; she had never been outdoorsy. Her head was immediately convinced she was most likely very allergic and was going to die. She called Jesse a couple of times more.

Shelby felt something slick run down her wrist and wondered if it was blood or something more sinister. If it was blood, at least it would explain why both of her hands were numb and tingling at the same time, but soon the sensation inched up to her arms, and her back, and her neck, and then fell down her entire body until it was on her toes. Her chest constricted and she was sure she wasn't getting any air at all, so she forced herself to inhale, forgetting all the rules about how to not hyperventilate. It didn't matter; if anything, her chest felt more and more restricted. Her neck and face were on fire, and she started to turn, and turn and turn, screaming for Jesse, until she was so lightheaded that it took her all of two steps to stumble and fall.

Luckily she felt on her butt, not on her face. Not so luckily, that meant her whole body weight crumpled on top of her bound hands painfully. She would have groaned, but she was still trying to catch her breath.

She felt a hand sweep into her back and raise her up a little, and another one started massaging her chest, and Jesse's voice traveled back to her as he cooed "Ssshhh, breathe now," amongst other similar things, to her repeatedly. Shelby clasped onto his warmth, way too relieved that it was over, that he was actually there and that she was not going to be devoured to death by unseen creatures to give much thought to what had just transpired. She leaned forward and to her side a bit, and her face met his chest, and she was all too happy to just sink into it, letting the smell of his cologne coupled with fabric softener sooth her.

He hugged her close, his fingertips still trailing little circles near her breast for a couple of minutes while she regained some level of composure. When she started to relax into him, she felt his fingers move up to her face and slid her blindfold down. She, nevertheless, downright refused to raise her eyes from his chest. Blood was returning to her brain, and she was starting to get a grip on what he had just submitted her too.

"Are you ready to talk now?"

Jesse asked finally, and she didn't know what to do. She was in no condition of carrying out even the most trivial conversation, and most importantly, she really didn't wish to. However, at the same time, she didn't want to say anything that would prompt him to indeed leave her there, or worse, secure the blindfold back. So she stayed silent, but he kept nudging her.

She sighed, frustrated and just positively desperate and tried to make her voice cooperate when her mouth was very, very dry.

"I think it'd be poor timing considering I'm feeling a strong sense of hatred towards you right now."

Shelby still didn't look up, but she sensed Jesse stiff against her body and she was petrified. He would abandon her in the middle of that place, for sure.

She looked up for a second and his face was filled with contempt and irritation, and she didn't know what to do, but when he got up he actually pulled her with him, and before she could think he had thrown her over his shoulder, like he was some type of caveman or she was just a potato sack. Shelby gasped, indignant, and wriggled a little because his shoulder blade was pressing against her tender stomach, and coupled with the inverted position of her head, it was making her need to vomit. But she didn't struggle much. Of all evils, that must have been the lesser. At least he was taking her back. Plus, if she slipped, it was going to be an ugly fall.

When they finally emerged upon the cabin, Jesse marched inside, straight to the room and aggressively tossed her on the bed. She whimpered from the pain caused by landing on her sufficiently wounded and sore arms, yet again, but didn't brood over it much since Jesse was soon on top of her. Shelby pushed her feet against the covers, trying to move herself away, but really it was all futile when Jesse had such advantage. He pulled her arms towards him and worked her handcuffs, and as soon as he freed one hand, Shelby took upon herself to struggle as much as she could.

Jesse grabbed both of her wrists without much effort and gripped them tightly, making her cry out in pain and any energy she had to resist him seemed mooted. He pinned her down to the bed, one of his knees pressed against her abdomen in a way that made it impossible for her to move even if she recovered, and secured the handcuff to the headboard, locking her other wrist up so strictly against the piece of wood she couldn't move her arms at all.

She didn't bother facing him. Instead, she made quite a contortion to look at her wrists and found that one of them was indeed smeared with her blood, and she knew that if she thrashed around she would only deepen the gash, so she stayed very quiet, even though she could feel her arms becoming strained right away.

"Maybe we both do need a little time to ourselves," Jesse spat angrily at her, before jumping off the bed and leaving her locked, alone, in the dark.

* * *

><p><strong>AN: Yep, another one. I actually just wanted to talk about the song that I used for this chapter, since it wasn't featured within the story as I had done previously. I'm going to post the lyrics down here just so you can understand why I felt this song in particular was so right for this story, and this chapter. And for anyone who is curious, the song is performed by British Singer Rebecca Ferguson. She's so great and I hope some of you do take the time to listen to this song in particular, because it's really good. **

**Shoulder To Shoulder**  
><em>Rebecca Ferguson<em>

Cause i feel safe when you're near me  
>And i can hold you completely<br>Though you constantly hurt me

And we fight  
>And we cry<br>And we tell the same lies about love  
>And we cling to each other shoulder to shoulder against the world<p>

So i'm gonna drag you down  
>Whilst you drag me down<br>And i'm gonna shout at you  
>Whilst you shout at me until we realize that real love is free free<p>

And i get a kick when you worry  
>That you are just no good for me<br>And i feel weak watching you plead

And we fight  
>And we cry<br>And we tell the same lies about love  
>And we cling to each other shoulder to shoulder against this world<p>

So i'm gonna drag you down  
>Whilst you drag me down<br>And i'm gonna shout at you  
>Whilst you shout at me until we realize that real love is free free<p>

Don't be my downfall  
>Don't be my downfall<br>Don't be my downfall  
>Don't be my downfall<p>

Let's leave it alone  
>We can work it out<br>Find our way  
>Forget the past<br>Cause i love you and you love me  
>So let's crawl free<p>

So i'm not gonna pull you down  
>Whilst you pull me down<br>And i'm not gonna shout at you  
>Whilst you shout at me because i've realized that real love is free<br>Free


	4. You're My Guiding Light

**A/N: I know, six months! I realize I have been a crappy writer, and I'm so, so sorry. I just had a lot going on in my life for a little while there. Ended up quitting my job (twice), spent a long studying out of the country, and it has been a massive ups and down period for me. A lot of stress that I'm keen to forget and some very memorable moments I'm glad I got to live fully. But now I'm back.**

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 4 – You're My Guiding Light<strong>

Shelby didn't know what to do with herself. Not that she could do anything at all, and that was certainly the root of the problem. Her arms, shoulders and back were burning with tension so severely that her whole body started to quiver again, and she wished she could convince herself that the wounds the handcuffs were inflicting were not going to get that much worse. But the blood had her freaked out, and she couldn't brave against it and find a less straining position. So she stared at the ceiling.

Her chest was heavy, as if there was an elephant on top of her, and she was sure her heart was not supposed to be beating this erratically, but she felt a distance from those feelings, almost as if they weren't happening to her at all. She couldn't focus; her mind felt simply weightless and she wasn't sure if she could indeed still see sparkles of light exploding in her peripheral vision or if her mind was flashing them back to her.

Her toes started tingling again and she tried rubbing them against the covers, but it only intensified, and then she felt her fingers tingle too. The room seemed to be spinning, and her stomach was swirling in accordance, and she just shut her eyes and prayed it would stop. It didn't.

Shelby curled her legs to her side, trying to make herself as small as possible, but that too was of little comfort. Not at that point, when the bed seemed to be dancing under her helpless body, violently swinging her world until she felt she would dispose of whatever content her body still held. She clamped her mouth shut and clenched her eyes tighter, and a little whimper of horror escaped through her nose, the queasiness drenching her senses to the point that even her terror and anger were besieged. Tears pooled against the side of her nose, and she tried to rub them off against her right arm, but the movement caused the handcuff to grind against the cut on the other arm bringing out fresh tears.

She wished that Jesse had meant five minutes when he said that they needed time, but she knew very well that wasn't the case. So she was hoping he would take a couple of hours, calm down and let her lose. Or that at least she would pass out and sleep through it. She doubted it, however. Although she was immobile, she was fairly agitated. She was still shuddering slightly from nerves; and she kept humming from the back of her throat into her mouth – a nervous tic she had had since she was little. Her fingertips were tapping randomly into her palms – another symptom of anxiety. She knew she needed to stop, quiet down and let the exhaustion swallow her, but her body just wouldn't shut down. And she couldn't help but think Jesse might be capable of leaving her restrained like that for days even. It wasn't like she could imagine him above torture anymore.

She wondered if the release of adrenaline had been so big out there in the woods that she was just stuck in overdrive. It wasn't simply about the survival of the body, but maybe of the mind too. She needed to be hyper enough to not dwell on what she had just suffered, to not be emotional about it. But now, she was starting to feel it all tear at her— the baffling realization of just what Jesse had done, the inability to comprehend or accept it, and the stomach-turning anger.

She knew this was part of the path that had gotten them there. She felt, of course, responsible. She had been a huge influence on Jesse's current personality. He had come to her as a not so easy, overly confident performer, and she had shaped him into a soldier for Vocal Adrenaline. She had fed his competitiveness, encouraged him to play dirty and be ruthless, taught him to never settle for 'no' and do whatever it took, no matter how questionable, and she had endorsed his fickle, self-serving temper.

Shelby had left her home early. She had been a kid, a bit younger than Jesse, and she hadn't known one tenth as much about the brutality of the world as she had envisioned. Adding giving up a child and seeing her dreams turn to ashes for reasons beyond her comprehension, and she had needed to become harder than she would have liked.

Life, it seems, always finds new effective curveballs to sweep you off your feet. So, kindness had never been on her teaching agenda. She was known to be merciless and cold towards her competition, and that was the attitude she expected from her students, in show choir and in life. Think first of yourself, then at least the next ten times, think of yourself too.

She understood that, to an extent, it was the St. James' fault too. Shelby didn't think either would be supportive of Jesse's actions that night at all. They were fair, good people; Heather was in the FBI, after all. Nevertheless, they were not serene and diplomatic people in the least. In fact, she got the impression that although Jesse didn't bring it up much, and he had quite a devotion and reverence to his father, that one of Theodore shortcomings was that he could be quite tyrannical and ill-tempered when opposed. That hardly bode for agreeable, yielding children.

That didn't wash away the culpability from Jesse's hands. She was a firm believer that every person had the tools to craft themselves into the people they wanted to be. But the problem with Jesse was that these were his three role models in life: Heather, Theodore and herself. They were all Jesse loved, admired, and wanted to be. Three people that, by large, let anger fuel their efforts and carry them through every day.

She wanted Jesse's first step towards adulthood to be disentangling himself from this dangerous web of barely self-recriminating hostility. Instead, she got a display of a self-aggrandizing domineering man who wouldn't accept a loss he should have, at least in some degree, foreseen. This was not a kid that was ready to step into real life, especially not show business. And that only made her feel like she had failed Jesse in one more unbearable way.

However, Jesse had failed her too. He had shattered her blind trust in him into a million pieces. He had ruined what she once considered to be a heartfelt, innocent connection. Before all of this had happened, just the thought of Jesse could put a smile on her face; now it came with a bucket full of anxiety. The things going through his mind terrified her.

"Am I ever going to go home again?" As absurd at the question might have seemed hours before, it was hammering around inside her brain now, and she worked herself up to such a fretful state, that she started tossing in the bed slightly until a ripping pain soared through her. She yelped and her body arched in spasm, the hot pain traveling through her body until even her toes were curled in agony.

Shelby felt like the air was wet and she was drowning; her muscles and arteries were pulsing, and she didn't grasp that her body was trashing of its own accord and her wrists were getting lacerated.

She was unable to notice the door opening or even the lights turning on before a frantic Jesse hopped on the bed.

"Shelby, what's wrong? I heard you screaming, what's wrong?" he asked rapidly, sounding very panicky.

Shelby tried to answer, but was only capable of staggering through a series of unintelligible sounds; the difficulty breathing and urge to throw up were just overpowering. Jesse tried to caress her forehead, but she flinched away; her eyes had shut tightly and she was moaning laboriously.

Shelby felt Jesse struggle to get the handcuffs off her; he was moving slowly and gently, and whispering some reassuring things that she couldn't discern. As soon as she felt her arms being freed, she curled herself into a ball. She knew she had to breathe through the pain, so she kept her eyes closed, not wanting to see any more blood. It was sufficient that she could feel it.

She was suddenly lifted, and she wanted to shout but all she managed was to groan. Jesse brought her close to him and cradled her against his chest, murmuring repeatedly for her to try to calm down. She wanted to slap him, to punch him, to rebel against this care; yet, she had no energy. Even as the pain was dying down into a persistent, but thankfully confined throb, she couldn't move. Jesse's hug had a familiarity that was both unnerving and soothing.

His hands were so soft as they stroked her arms and back and massaged her scalp. Jesse's lips kept pressing hectic, desperate kisses on her hairline and forehead, and he was still mumbling something that sounded like an apology under his breath, but Shelby just gave up and let the darkness engulf her.

**TGO**

Jesse sat at the couch and looked at his stretched hands; they were shaking relentlessly. No matter how many deep breaths he took, how many times her combed his fingers through his mess of wavy hair, his hands wouldn't stop shaking. The lump in the back of his throat wouldn't go away. His heart's thumping didn't hurt any less.

He would like very much to be able to convince himself it was the physical effort that had left him in that state. But hell, that was a weak rhetoric to sell even to himself. He knew what had set him off.

Shelby was the type of person that always focused on what was broken; it was what had allowed her to become such a striving coach. They could be marvelous on the stage; she would find the flaws. She was wired to focus on the negative, always. It was infuriating.

And granted, most people would only be able to focus on the negative aspects of a kidnapping, and the regrettable things he had done and said through the course of it, but he felt they were terribly stuck and her determination to only center her attention on all the things that were incredibly wrong between them was keeping them from figuring out a good outcome for the shit-storm they were trapped in.

So, he was pissed at Shelby. For six years she had allowed him to grow closer to her, to learn to trust her and to lean on her, to love her. Now she had only one directive for him: stop caring, stop trying. He had exhausted all the possibilities. He had insisted on every argument he could possibly conceive: he had explained himself, he had even revealed his plan, which, to his dismay, had horrified Shelby more than he could ever have anticipated. Still, she refused to change her mind, to try anything different; by now she was even refusing to talk anymore.

He was never going to tell her so, but he thought it was partially why she had failed to become a big star. Shelby was a great performer, and a captivating one at that. But as talented and incredibly smart as the woman was, she would shut down when something was not all right and she would dwell on things forever. Shelby moved at her own pace, and it was not a pace that favored anything but predictable success and perfection. He was sure everything that had been happening since she saw Rachel at Sectionals was too much, too fast for Shelby's highly systematic self-possession. He wanted to hold her hand and help pull her through it. And he wouldn't deny she had fair reasons to want distance from him, but they just didn't have the time she would need to make things right. If they took this at her pace, he would be in California and he didn't know just which level of denial she would have reached before the loneliness, the regrets and the unhappiness engulfed her.

He couldn't help but to think of his mother. Shelby reminded him so much of her in that they both had their own ways to go about things and neither of them tolerated being questioned on their own well-being. Heather would tell everybody how she loved so much the marriage that didn't exist in any conventional sphere anymore and the kids she barely saw three times a year, even though one had spent quite some time at rehab and the other struggled with bulimia for four years, and mainly, she would always emphasize how much she loved her daily routine of hunting monsters all over Ohio. Now, Jesse didn't question his mother's hunger for making the world a safer place, not that she had a warm spot in her heart for her family. However, every time he saw her, it seemed that her deep green eyes had seemed less alive.

He had no idea how to bring his mother back, how to make her passionate and engaged again. But he couldn't lose another woman that he loved. The fire that Shelby had exuded rebuffing him had been the most fervently he had witness her fighting for anything.

He recognized that there was only so much he could push her with this tactic; he knew from hanging around his mother when he was younger that somebody who endured a long captivity would eventually become conformed and adapt to the situation. That was not what he wanted, no matter what he had fed Shelby. In fact, he had only said that because he knew it would cause a strong reaction in her. He had her fighting for herself, and that was a relief, but now he had to convince her it was worth fighting for them.

In regards to that, he was a bit pissed at himself too, of course. While a part of him had been trying to push her over the edge, to break her open and expose every bit of raw spirit she possessed, another part of him had gotten genuinely upset. His blood had boiled, and he had charged against her in a way that, he realized now, it was simply inacceptable.

He knew he should never have dragged her into the woods; that careless act would accomplish nothing more than additional negative feelings from the surely already high pile Shelby was harboring. At least. Jesse couldn't help but flash back to the conversation he had had with his mother when she had gotten the phone call from school, informing about the whole Rachel debacle and his three day suspension (that had been on Mr. Baris part only – Shelby had submitted them to if-you-are-so-intimidated-you're-gonna-train-until-midnight treatment for two weeks and prohibited anybody that took part of the egging from receiving rewards for Regionals and Nationals). Heather had travelled all the way from Cleveland and arrived in Toledo livid, spitting fire; but it was the lone thing she had said once she had calmed down and expressed her deep disappointment that had stayed with him.

"Abuse like this can hurt someone emotionally in ways you can't expect; something you think it's harmless can hit a person deeply depending on their personalities or baggage," she had explained sadly before having to find her way back to her all consuming work. If his mother was so distressed about the situation with Rachel, he didn't even want to imagine her reaction to this abduction. But he was most concerned about how right she might have been.

Shelby had been taking some of his abuse kicking and screaming. And that was what he expected. This was his resilient, backbiting Shelby. When he had abandoned her on the clearing, he had expected her to work herself up. That was why he had continued to circle around her, mulling over things, even as she shouted his name repeatedly. However, the second he heard her stumbling to the hard floor, his heart had nearly stopped. He had wanted to frighten her, but not that much. Not falling to the ground, having a panic attack much. Not bloodied wrist much. He was starting to get worried about her.

His mother's warning was resounding more strongly within him every second. What if his game had stricken Shelby harder than he had imagined it would? What if she wasn't as tough as he had always perceived her to be and he had done something that could scar her for life?

Jesse brushed his eyes with his trembling palms. He really wished there was any alcohol in the cabin, but his mother had a very strict rule about that. He was considering a hot shower, when a bloodcurdling scream reached his ears and made him jump on his feet.

Jesse had never heard anything like that, and it was all the more daunting because it had to have come from Shelby. Composed Shelby that, yes, sometimes yelled at her students when she was really frustrated, but never, ever showed emotion that compared to that. The yelp was raw, and it hit him brutally, springing him into immediate motion.

Jesse was at the door right away, raging a battle to manage to put the key in and unlock it. He ran inside as soon as he pried it open and flung himself on the bed. Shelby's usually pale complexion was tinged a deep crimson, and she was once again battling for air. His hands were on her chest and neck, trying to help her, and feeling for her very accelerated heartbeat, but it soon became clear Shelby didn't even notice him doing any of those things. She didn't acknowledge any of his questions either. He touched her cheek softly, hoping it would break whatever stupor she was in, but all she did was recoil.

He realized then he would have to uncuff her before he tried anything else, because neither of them could do something while she was so tightly restrained. He fished the tiny keys out of his pocket hurriedly and bent towards the headboard, and that's when he saw it. Shelby's wrists were botched up. The cut on her right one had gashed and now a good part of her forearm was covered in blood; the cuts on the other wrist didn't look so serious, but there was an ugly bruise around it.

He tried to work cautiously to remove the handcuffs, particularly on the arm that was more damaged. He didn't want to worsen things for her, so it took a few minutes, especially since his hands weren't exactly steady at that moment. Shelby managed to stay still, but through her clenched jaw she was groaning in a way that made it clear she was in so, so much pain.

"Shelby, I'm sorry and I'm trying to get you out, just please… Try to take a deep breath. Please, take a deep breath for me. C'mon. I'm so, so sorry, but you need to be calm."

Jesse prayed Shelby would listen to his words; that they would break into her fog. He couldn't assess the severity of her wounds, but he imagined that the issue wasn't that the pain it was causing her was excruciating or even worse than the one from her head wound; she just seemed to have withdrawn into it and let it shock all her senses. She just wasn't responsive in any way, and he needed her to be rational enough to cognize that she wasn't going to die from it. He needed her to stop freaking out.

Once he had succeeded in removing the metal cuffs from Shelby's arms, she turned away from him, but it seemed almost an unconscious decision. She curled into herself to a point in which Jesse couldn't even discern if she was still hyperventilating or starting to sob. As daring a move as it was, he didn't brood much over it, before pulling her up and hugging her in a way he knew was soothing. He had held his little sister Sophie after her one too many relapses, while she cried about her inability to feel normal, to accept her body or to like herself in any way at all.

And the same feelings that tore him apart whenever he had consoled Sophie were burning a hole through his heart now. Shelby was so badly injured, and he was responsible for this. He had seen that she had cut herself before he had locked her up, he should never have bound her like that. All he could do was keep saying "I'm so sorry," but he knew that wasn't as effective as he wished it would be. There was no way to verbally express how devastated and distressed he was feeling, seeing her in that state.

Jesse caressed her back, and then her arm, feeling every single raised hair on her velvety skin. Her skin was a bit cold, which he thought was weird considering she was so agitated. He kept apologizing profusely, half hoping she would acknowledge it and half expecting her to pull away and slap him. He kissed the top of her head which was covered with a bit of cold sweat; that startled him into wondering just how poorly she was feeling, but he didn't have long to linger on it as he felt her muscles relax under his embrace and her head become heavy on his shoulder.

The first thing to pass through Jesse when he fully comprehended Shelby was out cold was despair. He actually shook her for a couple of seconds, calling her name, before sense descended on him and he decided to even check her vitals. He was not a doctor or even anything of the sort of a science geek, but before both Patrick and Sophie were sent to military boarding school, he had shared a house with a brother that abused drugs and a sister that was constantly malnourished and hungry; so he had made it his duty to be able to tell if a person needed an ambulance.

Superficially, by his amateurish opinion, she seemed fine. Her heart-beating had slowed down to an acceptable rhythm and she was finally breathing normally now that she wasn't actively panicking. However, he couldn't really tell if she required medical attention without taking a closer look at her wrists; a task made impossible by the way Shelby had tucked both of her arms close to her body.

Jesse pulled the pillow he had given her earlier to the middle of the bed and carefully lowered Shelby into the mattress. He went to the bathroom and retrieved a first aid kit, a few moist towels and also found a few extra pillows on his way back to the bedroom.

Jesse put an added pillow under Shelby's head to insure it would be propped on a better angle for her to breathe, and then slipped a pillow under each of her arms, regardless of how he would get rid of the blood stains later. Again, he didn't have the qualifications to treat her in any possible level, so he was playing it by ear and with the little common sense he thought he had.

He used the moist towels to clean the blood from her right arm to the point that he could actually see the gash. There were actually three different cuts now, one that didn't seem very bad on the external part of her arm, and two on the internal, sensitive spot of her wrists; those were the one that bled so much. Jesse had barely passed Biology, so he didn't know if he should be worried about all the veins and artery that were around that general area, but he was still greatly concerned. She was still bleeding a little, and hell, it might not be enough to kill her (and maybe her artery was okay after all), but he was sure a doctor needed to take a look at her. Maybe she needed stitches, and if not, at the very least she would probably need some medicine in order to not get a ghastly infection.

He imbued a cotton swab with some anti-septic liquid he found in the kit, and cleaned the cuts in a way he believed to be somewhat properly, being very grateful for the first time that Shelby was unconscious; he remembered this stuff stung a lot and the last thing he wanted was for her to be experiencing more pain.

Just as he was finishing up with the cuts on her other hand, however, Shelby stirred and moaned under her breath. He was sure the color had drained from his face and he stilled, hoping she would stay out, but her eyelids battled delicately and she looked at him. Her always intense green eyes were glazy and dazed.

"Go back to sleep, Shelby," he muttered tenderly, his free hand accidentally resting on top of her stomach, but Shelby just blinked at him and licked her dry lips. Jesse dabbed the swab quickly over the rest of the cut, and even then Shelby hissed and shut her eyes in response to the pain.

He started applying some aloe vera gel over the cuts, expecting her to nod off if he didn't keep talking to her, but in a few seconds she was staring at him again. Her face held this weird scowl and he could only foresee that she might be really pissed and trying to get some wind to vent it.

However, all that came all of her mouth when she finally talked was "I adopted a baby", and Jesse had to stop and contemplate if one of them could possibly be hallucinating.

"What? Shelby, what?" Jesse propelled himself on his elbow and towered over her to gaze into her eyes more easily, but now Shelby's eyes were just unfocussed.

"You don't get to take that away from me." Shelby was clearly only half conscious; her voice was laced with grogginess, and her words stumbled out of her amidst long pauses and heavy intakes. "You don't get to take away my freedom, my life, my chance at happiness…"

Jesse was stunned into silence. That was not at all what he wanted to do, on the contrary! And since when did she have a baby, why had he no idea about it and where the hell was said child right at that moment? He instantly started to seriously freak out. Why didn't Shelby mention she had a baby to get home to?

"Shelby…" he managed to mumble nervously, but he was cut out by her.

"You don't own me," her whisper was strangled and he thought she had succeed in holding a sob in, but a tear still slid down the side of her face.

Jesse rubbed little circles on her stomach and she seemed to calm down considerably. Just enough for him to be able to ask her if her baby was okay without her, and for her to nod tiredly, so at least he could breathe now too. Jesse bandaged both of her arms, Shelby's half-open eyes following his every move. When he was finally done, he sat on his heels and looked at her with a sober expression.

"I don't want to own you, Shelbs." He wanted to continue, to unleash all of his emotions on her, but the woman was barely awake and it wasn't the right time. Jesse searched the little velvet bag his mother always kept inside the kit; every house they had always had some basic medicine, ever since they were babies. There were three different types of painkillers, the off-the-counter variety, and he waved them in front of Shelby's face, questioning if there was anything there she was used to taking. Shelby looked from one to the other for several moments, before she grabbed the ibuprofen.

"Hold on, I'll grab you a glass of water," Jesse said, already crawling off the bed.

"No, it's fine." Shelby took a pill off the small case and swallowed it without fuss. Jesse's eyes must have been wide in awe, because she actually chuckled. Honestly, it had been a long time now since Shelby had been openly amused by him, and it was as welcome as it was a heartbreaking insight. "No gag reflex," she added teasingly, and he thought there was the ghost of a smirk looming over her face, but she was just so tired.

Shelby turned on her side, both of her arms still resting comfortably on the pliable cushion. There was so much unsaid between them right now; so many things to try and fix. Jesse felt an urgency now pulsing more than when he had grabbed Shelby from her office, but he felt he owed it to her not to discuss anything serious at that time. She was too vulnerable to fight her own battles, she was sleepy, and well, now she was drugged.

Jesse sat against the headboard next to her and faced Shelby. She seemed so small and defenseless all of a sudden. He couldn't help but to reach out and stroke her silky hair, and he felt even worse when all the reaction it enticed was a sigh. Her eyes held a pleading quality that tore at him, and he knew he was making things more difficult for her, but how could he leave her when the last time he did so, she ended up hurting herself? No, he needed to be with her; even if it was hard for the both of them.

"Tell me about him."

Shelby frowned, and seemingly made a monumental effort just to ask, "Him?"

"The baby."

At that, Shelby smiled. And boy did he miss her open, warm, earnest smiles. He could just melt into them.

"It's a she. Beth. The little girl Quinn gave birth to."

"How did you get Quinn and Puck to choose you to adopt?"

"I don't know. Showing up at the right place, at the right time. I confess it was a bit of crass opportunism, but… You should see her. She's so perfect."

Shelby's beautiful face was illuminated. He could trace the happiness through every little pore. It was gorgeous. It made him happy. How could he ever try to take that away from her? How could she think he would? Yes, everything he had done to her had been grisly, and he still intensively craved her presence in his life; he craved the continuance of their relationship and maybe even more. Nevertheless, he loved her and he wouldn't destroy such a magical occurrence in her life if he had known.

"Why didn't you tell me?"

Jesse's voice wasn't hard or demanding. He just felt defeated, like her attempts to push him out of her life had just become too real. Not talking to him was one thing, keeping a secret about something so major, that spelled that she really didn't want anything to do with him.

He knew Shelby had taken note of the anguished tone of his voice because he saw her sink her face into the pillow.

"I was afraid." She spoke so quietly, but he still could discern it in her voice. She wasn't ashamed to have been scared of him, because she was still terrified.

"Shelby, what did you think I was going to do?"

Jesse pressed, his hand going through her hair to the base of her neck and forcing her to look at him. He knew right away it was the wrong thing to do. Shelby once dazed eyes had become wide and alert. But she clenched her jaw and he saw something small spark in her; Shelby didn't back down without a fight, not even while groggy and weak.

"Is this the part where you tell me you'd never hurt me?" she barked, and her voice, coarse as it was, made it even more intimidating than if she was charging at him with full force. "You held a gun to my head. You are holding me against my will and acting insanely. You threatened my life."

"I did not," Jesse cut her off, jumping from his place, but at her raised eyebrow, he raised his hands in surrender. He had never meant to threaten her life, obviously, but he was willing to admit some of the things he had said to her might have been suggestive. He didn't think she deserved to have him arguing that point of top of everything.

"I would never try to keep you away from your child."

Shelby groaned and stared at him furiously. "Oh, you're just so considerate and kind to me, Jesse."

Jesse sighed and shook his head at her dripping sarcasm. He deserved it, but it still cut him like a knife.

"I just want you to be happy. This whole episode is a giant disagreement between the two of us about the ways in which you should go about it, one that is not over yet and the mistakes I made surely don't speak the best of my intentions… but I want you happy."

Shelby stared beyond him blankly, her body tensely still, her silence screaming the one thing she refused to say. It wasn't simply that she was unhappy; it was that he was causing the unhappiness. He had always been her whole support system, and now she had nothing, at the very time in which she was over-flooded with unexpected emotions. Again, Shelby did not have the coping mechanism to fully rebuild herself in any acceptable time frame, and he had to start facing the fact that he lacked the tools to fix her.

Jesse had never, ever thought of himself as a failure on any level, but every attempt to rescue her from her resolute seclusion was an added blow to their crumbling relationship, and he was starting to realize, it had been slowly eroding what he had envisioned to be an indestructible person. He was reaching for solutions, and coming up empty, and he felt like such a failure.

Why did he never manage to do good by the women in his life? He had watched his mother and Sophie implode while he was too self-involved with his ambitions to make it his problem, and when he tried to step it up and be a man because he thought Shelby was in a fast track to self-destruction? Not only he was wrong, as she had been covertly taking steps towards her dreams, but he had been the one holding her head under the water and deterring a much needed first breath of her new life. And that was going to haunt him forever.

He would have this picture etched in his brain until the day he died. Along with his mother's desperate cry – the only time he had ever seen her shed tears – as she broke down into his father's arms in the emergency room when Patrick overdosed, and the feeling of Sophie's ribs as he held her while his 13 year-old sister had a panic attack about going out to the beach with the rest of the family, whispering feverishly about how fat and ugly she was, or the worst of all, how all she wanted was to disappear from this world. Now he would have this. A memory of Shelby's mangled wrists, of her blood on his hands and his clothes, a direct result of the panic he had instilled in her by physically assaulting her and terrorizing her to the point that she would honestly think he could kill her.

She had said at the beginning of all this that a person that could do what he was doing to her without caring could only be a monster. He cared so, so much about her, but now he felt like she was right. And he had to step away; he had to take her home and let her be. Because he might have been destined to be a great artist, but he was also a tiny, worthless man. Hell, he didn't even feel like a man. A man made his loved ones feel safe and carried them through hardships. And he had failed in all accounts, in all the times that mattered.

Jesse felt like a fist was pushing down this throat, repeatedly and deservedly punching his guts as he maneuvered himself into a lying position next to Shelby and stared at the ceiling. Now he knew how Sophie felt, even if their anxiety stemmed from very different issues. He felt ugly and he just wanted to disappear in a puff of smoke, be erased, so that both Shelby and he could have an easy out.

"You'll be a great mom," he finally whispered to her, without daring to even look at her. At that moment, that was all he knew. He hadn't been able to deliver Rachel like he wanted to, but she would get a family now, as she deserved. She would be fantastic at it, because no matter how many of her relationships had derailed, Shelby was still very good at caring. And now she would be able to focus that on someone who belonged to her.

Shelby didn't say anything, and he only got a glimpse of her moist eyes and maybe-smile when he tried to get up to leave and she put a hand on his arm to stop him, stunning the crap out of him. She seemed somewhat moved, but he was not taking guesses on her feelings anymore. All she said as an explanation was, "Stay. I'm still mad but just… stay", which was good enough for him.

He could see why the woman wouldn't appreciate being left by herself on the dark room once again, and if his warm body was a palliative to her fears in like, any level, he was more than elated to oblige. So he just let his head hit the mattress and closed his eyes. His mind was so full and his stomach was so, so heavy. His whole body seemed denser all of a sudden, like he was made of lead. But then all he could hear was Shelby's soft, serene breathing; all he could feel was her warmth even though they were still separated by a pillow; all he could smell was her. And he felt himself unwind.

**TGO  
><strong>

Shelby stared at her bandaged arms drowsily; there was pang of discomfiture as she took in what had occurred to her in the past few minutes. She had never been the fainting type of woman. Granted, you didn't have to be a psychology expert to imagine that if you wanted to make her hysterical, a bleeding wrist was the way to go. But she still hated feeling this weak.

It didn't help that she felt lethargic. Now that wasn't news. Shelby had always been pretty sensitive to any medication, even off-the-counter ones, which was why she often avoided them and would have continued to do so if she wasn't in so much pain. At least Jesse had had some ibuprofen; for whatever reason, acetylsalicylic acid always made her puke and gave her insufferable stomach aches, and paracetamol turned her into a useless sleepy mess. When she had been sick, she had barely ever been functional. It always took her ten to twelve hours to shake the strong drugs she was regularly given, so she had practically lived in a state of numbness.

She redirected her gaze to Jesse. She was so confused. She was still irate for what he had done to her, but then one second later, he was tending to her and holding her tightly while she had a panic attack, and she realized that she missed being taken care of. Nobody had done anything for her in decades, and she actually felt pathetic that the tiniest display of concern from Jesse could mean so much to her.

However, she had her own quota of apprehension on his behalf. The look Jesse had on his eyes before he felt asleep scared her, not because it was threatening and angry, but because there was a darkness and gloominess about it that she felt familiar with, but couldn't identify properly. It made her uneasy, and even in her current state, she couldn't close her eyes and nod off.

Shelby leaned over the fluffy pillow towards Jesse and inspected him closer under the soft moonlight. She had never seen him so disheveled or serene. It made the terrifying man that had taken her disappear from her mind; he was just the harmless, devoted young man she adored over all other things human. Shelby couldn't resist letting her fingertips trail over his handsome face— that face that had always been able to make her smile just by being on her sights. There was still a vestige of his musky cologne oozing from him and she let herself close her eyes and inhale softly. The worst thing he had taken from her in the end had been this: the closeness, the intimacy. Her ability to just stand next to Jesse and feel him; he didn't even have to touch her, for her to feel like she wasn't alone anymore.

She felt like a drug addict coming to terms for the first time with the fact that she wouldn't be able to shake her vice so easily. She tore herself away from Jesse quickly and shook her head, trying to stop this insane craving from overtaking her body. She felt sordid and torn and angry. But she also felt betrayed by him, by herself, by the world. Why did everything need to be so fucked up? He had abused her! Why couldn't she just hate him and be done with him? What was wrong with her?

Even aware as she was, she kept tossing and turning on the bed until she surrendered and let one of her hands fall next to his arms. They weren't quite touching, but just that was enough for her to start to relax and let the fatigue wash over her.

Shelby woke up suddenly and was startled by how dark it was. Or was it… She bit her lip nervously, as her senses became more acute and she was able to discern the piece of cloth pressed against her eyes. Her heart started beating like a jackhammer right away, while she held back the urge to cry. Why had Jesse done that to her again? What terrible offense had she committed now that warranted the blindfold? She had been unconscious!

"Jesse," she whimpered, defeated and not even sure he was around. She waited for a response; she waited forever. She was ready to start yelling again when she was met with a simple "I love you". It was dry statement, and it unnerved her. Jesse didn't even say 'good morning' to her without boiling with emotion. But at least she now knew he was a few feet from her and that he wasn't going to play the same game from the woods. She didn't, however, grasp what the hell he was doing.

She was making a gigantic effort not to lose it, until she heard the little metallic thud of a gun cocking. She was filled with so much dread, her whole body went ice cold. She tried to get up, but then felt the unyielding cuffs trapping her hands against the bed frame once again, and there was some type of sturdy material wrapped around her ankles, securing her on the other end of the bed.

Terror started to travel through her, overpowering, nauseating. She was wheezing. What on earth was going on? "Jesse," she tried again, her voice clearly cracking this time around, but she couldn't be bothered.

"I'm sorry," was his stony response and then she heard him pull the trigger. It was almost an insignificant sound, but to her, it was like an explosion. Except, nothing happened. He didn't shoot her. She was alive. She was alleviated.

And then she remembered. His initial plan, that look on his face; she knew that look. It was the look of a person that was giving up. And it dawned on her.

"No!" she screamed, trashing against her restraints wildly. It didn't matter if she was hurting herself, she had to stop him. "No, Jesse, don't!" she yelled harder, but was only met with the hollow sound of the trigger once more. Her despair only grew exponentially and she felt the harsh metal from the handcuffs grind into her skin as she tried at all costs to slip her hand through the impossibly small gap. She tried to kick, but the binds on her legs tightened to the point her feet became numb and her throat burned from her desperate screams.

"Jesse, please!"

She heard the trigger again; the gun went off.

"No! No! No!" Her cries stumbled out of her amidst her desperation. She could taste salt on her mouth from her tears and she doubled into herself like she had been kicked in the stomach, gasping for air, bawling so hard she lost all cognizance of the world around her. She didn't take in that she was free, that the room was slightly illuminated or that there was a strong pair of arms closed around her.

Jesse staggered. One minute he had been in a profound, dreamless slumber and then the other, Shelby was shouting his name. He was alert right away, prying the cushion she was sinking her nails into away from her clutch and pulling her quivering body into his arms. She stopped struggling, but she pulled her knees into his abdomen, put her head into her hands and kept emitting theses acute, feral screams that were just unbearable. If he thought she had had a meltdown earlier, he just could not characterize what was happening.

Shelby felt herself being shaken; one, two, three times. Nothing was enough to pierce through the dark cloud in her head. "Shelby," she heard his sweet voice against her ear, but that only made her weep harder, her whole body quaking with every sob. "Shelby, it's just a nightmare. Wake up."

Jesse kept repeating that like a mantra to Shelby, one of his arms holding her firmly against his chest and the other brushing her back, until she raised her eyes from her palms to his face. Something that looked like comprehension dawned on her, but to say that she recovered would have been a stretch.

Shelby placed her arms around Jesse's toned build, securing him against her with all her might while she kept wailing on his chest. She couldn't quite believe yet it was all just a dream; it had been too real, too frightening.

"Promise me you'll never leave," she begged vehemently through a couple of heart-wrenching sobs. Jesse was puzzled, naturally. All she had wanted up to that point was for him to be gone. Instead of giving her a vague response, he opted for just snuggling her closer and kissing her hair. She kept loudly crying; he was starting to think she would undo herself.

"Please, please, Jesse, I'm begging you. Promise me you won't hurt yourself."

Jesse sighed. He couldn't deny he had been having dark thoughts, but he had neither believed she would have been able to take notice, nor understood that it would have such a devastating effect on her. She was beyond frantic. His shirt was actually wet by now.

Shelby felt Jesse's fingers move deftly through her scalp; she didn't remember when he had found out this was one of her weak spots, but even as he worked his usual magic, she couldn't stop crying. Her heart didn't slow down. That freaking dream had terrified her into a puddle of horror. She couldn't move, not unless you counted her throwing one of her legs around Jesse's, which she didn't, because she hadn't perceived she had done that.

"Sshhh," he soothed her, his lips pressed on her temple, "I'd never do that to you or my family, Shelbs. I promise." She wasn't comforted however; that was not what she wanted to hear from him. She wanted to hear that he loved his live, that despite everything that was happening that he was set on his future and that he didn't have these thoughts. Did he have these thoughts? The prospective made her sink her nails into his back.

"Jesse, you can't think these things. You matter so, so much." Jesse understood that; even though she was pissed and she didn't want him in her life anymore, she would suffer if he harmed himself. She had already made that much clear. And he had made her suffer too much already. But what about the rest? He knew he was destined to be a star, but how much did that really count for anything, if it took him away from all of the people that had any value to him? Los Angeles just seemed like a hollow place now and he felt empty.

"I… I don't know, Shelbs. I just don't give a damn anymore."

"No!" She sobbed into his neck and clutched him harder. She sounded so, so scared. He really shouldn't have confided this to her.

Shelby made a monumental effort to unglue herself from him, and taking his face into her hands, forced his eyes to meet hers. She knew he wasn't just trying to screw with her; what she saw in them was too real.

"Look, I don't know how we are going to repair everything or if we'll ever be able to go back to normal. And I know it feels awful; I feel the same way you do about it. But we both have to keep going and make each other proud. You are gonna touch so many people with your gift; I just know it. Even after you kidnapped me, all that matters to me is that you still have your future and that you have the chance to change people's lives. Because you gave me so much love and so much to love, and just presented me with so much hope, that you got me through. I was just coming back from almost dying the first time I met you, and everything had changed for me. I couldn't have kids anymore, and even though I was still breathing, I felt like I had no future. I didn't feel like anything was worth fighting for. But then there was you, and your future was worth fighting for. So, I realized I wasn't done. You don't feel this right now, but you are not done, Jess."

Jesse felt the tears touch his jaw, but Shelby started drying them right away. He couldn't believe what she had just told him. He was hiccoughing as he held her head against his shoulder. He had been under the impression that he had failed her so colossally. It was almost too much to take in that she was practically claiming that he had saved her. She had made such a difference in his life, that if he had been able to affect her in any minimal way, he was already thrilled. It was already worth something. He really needed that validation.

He had no idea if they would be able to figure things out. Nevertheless, knowing that she would always carry a piece of him within her, that he had meant so much, gave him strength to face the unknown. "I'm not going anywhere, I promise. Okay? I promise on everything that's sacred to you that I will not do anything stupid. And I'll make you proud of me. I promise."

Shelby heard sincerity on Jesse's voice, but she didn't know how to embrace it. She hoped to God he wasn't lying just to calm her down, and she would spend every second of the next two months or so they still had left on the school year watching him like a hawk and pep-talking him to exhaustion. She had to be sure. That nightmare would forever have a terrifying grip on her soul.

For now, she tried to recuperate some measure of composure. She wasn't quite ready to pry herself away from Jesse, however. All of the longing that was pulsing somewhere within her core earlier had exploded into an incontrollable necessity.

It didn't help that Jesse wasn't exactly pushing her off him. On the contrary, he just reclined into the pillows she used earlier, never letting them disconnect, and placed her awkwardly on top of him, her head never leaving his shoulder. He was still absentmindedly stroking her hair, and when she started to try and snap the tense muscles on her shoulders, his other hand found the knot and started massaging it.

It was hard enough to contain her moan of pleasure when his skillful fingers unraveled the strained muscle, but it was taking more self-control than she currently possessed not to react when he drew her locks away and she felt his moist lips on the base of her skull. That was not an I'm-comforting-you-because-you're-so-distressed kiss and in the depths of her mind, she knew this was a really bad idea. She should be running and reigniting the lectures by now, but her body was overtaken with a shiver that even someone that used sex as an armor and weapon as often as she did couldn't possibly mistake.

Jesse felt Shelby run her nails through the side of his clothed torso nervously; he had been fully ready for her to jump off him and explain in how many spectrums of the universe they were totally in the wrong, not for that response. He was wary of her feelings at that point, more than ever before; she was extremely unguarded and distraught, and he didn't want to take advantage of her in any way. But that was the exact reason why it was so hard to not touch her; she seemed like she really needed some affection in that moment. Plus, she was spread flush against him, the faint remaining scent of her cherry-blossom bodywash making him lightheaded. He knew it was just another step on the wrong direction, but he wanted her so much.

Shelby felt Jesse hesitate and then start trailing languid kisses along the length of her neck. The hand on her back was caressing her up and down loosely, until Jesse slipped it under her blouse carefully, his fingertips rubbing softly every protuberant bone in her spine. Jesse stopped to suck the hollow valley between her neck and her collarbone before following down her shoulder, and his palm slid under her bra just as he tenderly bit her smooth skin. She groaned loudly this time, but that was not even a concern when she was hyper-aware that she had just grinded her hips into his, and being that Jesse was a teenage boy, she was counting on hell breaking loose or something.

Instead, regardless of the fact that she could feel through both of their pants that yes, she successfully gave him an erection, Jesse stopped and shifted them so she could be lying on the bed. Jesse stared down at her with a scowl of grave preoccupation and Shelby almost screamed at him to not talk, because that was certainly the point in which both a pause and a conversation were highly detrimental. That was going to be the breach for her to take note of how much she was about to fuck up.

"I don't want to hurt you," he tried to explain, and her eyes shone with misunderstanding. "I mean, I would never do that… to a woman. I don't want to take advantage of you."

Shelby was quiet for a moment, just waiting for the bewilderment to pass through her, and then she chuckled. It was so cute that he would turn cavalier all of a sudden.

"You're not forcing me into anything, Jess. I could have just told you to stop." And she should have, and now that they were patting the clear white elephant in the room, she felt apprehensive.

Jesse could see it in her eyes that just looking up at him was making her think of rules and morality, and a whole assortment of things he didn't really care about. But he really didn't want to cause any more damage than he had already, and he wasn't going start groping the ass of one of the people he loved the most in life, when they had ended up in a compromising position because some dream had left her shaken. The sex itself wasn't really that important to him. It wasn't that he didn't lust after Shelby; hell, he hadn't known what a sexual fantasy was before he crossed paths with the woman. However, all he wanted was to feel close to her again. To feel that electric connection pervade both of their bodies, their bond reawakening inside of them, stronger than ever. She had been his everything for almost half a decade now, and he couldn't leave with a tepid hug and a "see you in five years". It was all a matter of her feeling it too.

Jesse dropped his head into the pillow and pressed the side of his face against her cheek. She leaned in, savoring the small intimacy like a thirsty woman in the desert. She couldn't help but to treat every touch like it would the last one. After all, she had no idea how they were going to resolve things in the harsh light of real life. There, in the sultry darkness of some cabin in the middle of God-knows-where, removed from everything, hugs and kisses and sneaky caresses seemed less dangerous.

"I miss you," she heard his voice break with yearning and both of her hands squeezed his back reassuringly.

"I miss you too."

That was all it took for them both to relax. They were holding each other, and then Jesse turned his face and kissed her cheek, making her smile. She could live without acting out on the desire she felt build on her belly, but it was so nice to have him lavishing her with his devotion. It was so great to be able to openly physically express their love for each other. Sometimes she felt that what they had developed was too complex and weighty for words, or even the most beautiful songs to describe. However they had always had to be in check of how they demonstrated their fondness. Yet now, Jesse could shamelessly kiss her jaw, her eyes, her nose, while she lied there droopily smiling and it was all fine.

Jesse brushed his lips faintly against hers, and despite the temptation and the little throaty sound she made at that, he followed his path down towards her other shoulder. He glided his hand under her shirt once again, this time letting his fingers dexterously caress her bare abdomen. He heard Shelby's brusque intake of breath and felt her arch her back slightly, and was simultaneously highly pleased and amused that her stomach was her sensitive pleasure spot.

Shelby felt Jesse lift her blouse and then his lips closed on a patch of skin just under her navel and he sucked it passionately making her all woozy. She groaned as he nibbled higher and higher, every touch loving, but she couldn't help the smoldering heat between her legs.

Jesse raised his eyes occasionally to see Shelby's head trashing from one side to the other, her knuckles turning white from her grip on the pillow. It made her all the more loveable. The husky little noises she couldn't contain any longer weren't exactly making her less desirable either, and every contact between his mouth and her creamy skin just made him harder. Jesse pulled the shirt all the way up and Shelby helped him get it off her. He knew the risks of stopping for even one second, but he had to. He needed to admire her. It was impossible for him to not be in awe of her beauty, always, and for a couple of seconds all he could do was glance at her, marveled.

"I love you." He knew that she was aware, but he needed to remind her. He needed her to never forget. Her response was to pull him in and initiate the sweetest kiss he had ever received in his life. He had wanted this for so long, and the more he had grown to love her, the worst it became to not be able to. There was so much emotion conveyed in just that brief kiss. Okay, maybe not so brief. Not after they had to take a breath for the sixth time and still reached for each other with renewed ardor.

Shelby hoped the room was dark enough that Jesse wouldn't realize her eyes became moist when he abandoned her still sore and now very dry lips and took his time caressing the top of her breasts with the tip of his fingers, cherishing her. Before this whole ordeal happened, Jesse had been one of the very few people that had made her feel so incredibly precious. Knowing she was so treasured by him, even after he had hurt her so much, made her want to cry.

Jesse removed her dress pants in a flash, and nipped her left ankle. He trailed a path up her leg, nibbling and licking her flesh until she felt her lower body was in flames. Shelby made herself reign all of her clashing emotions and focus on this. She would regret it if she didn't relish every moment of the adoring foreplay she was being treated to; and well, she wanted to be able to remember it all. They had loved each other for almost four years and they would only get to be lovers once, and she wanted to commit it all to memory. She wanted this, the soft warm strokes of his tongue on the inside of her thighs to be the things that lingered, not what had occurred on the previous hours, or days. Jesse pulled her legs apart gently, and she felt his nose run up her clothed mound slowly and then his sultry lips kiss her affectionately through the fabric of her underwear.

Jesse straightened his body and sat down on her legs, leaving her panting from the pent up arousal, and took his shirt off. She felt a bit shameful that not only she was ogling her student, but getting a kick out of the fact that she made him become so, so fit that now she could drool all over his abs, and that was so much conflicting information that she had to shut her eyes and internally chastise herself. Jesse nuzzled her cheek and she let her eyelids flutter up and her fingertips brush the muscles of his arm. He had this sympathetic, doting look on his face that reminded her why, despite everything, her adoration for him so powerful.

Jesse pulled her into him, massaging her skull gently and kissed her forehead. She smiled shortly, and then rested her face against his bare upper body, while his hand played with her long chestnut hair. She felt so peaceful. She felt at home. She kissed his chest tenderly. First, it was a thanks-for-being-my-haven kiss. Then, a thank-for-loving-me; after that, it was 'I love you too'. And every single feeling she had had to bottle up for years, covering his torso. Until there was only "please, be with me" left. Her hands dropped and she found the zipper on his jeans. Shelby let her palm rest against his hard member, and feeling him was so surreal, she had to take a second to let this wash over her.

It started tentatively, with her fingers just exploring his length; but soon enough she was handling him with practiced ease, and he felt himself wobble and put too much weight on her body, because the sensation made him lose his balance. She chuckled merrily and he pouted at her reaction, before deciding that was surely unsexy as hell and that he needed to fight fire with fire. Jesse rapidly unhooked her bra and got rid of it. Shelby had this little euphoric glint in her eyes when he cupped her breasts reverently, but she completely let go when he started kneading them.

Shelby allowed Jesse to lower into her back, her chest ready to explode as he stared at her with this blistering passion. Jesse placed his hands over the hem of her panties and took a deep concentrated breath, as if he needed to prepare for what he was about to do and it was kind of endearing. He peeled the fabric from her at a snail's pace, making it a whole event because he couldn't stop savoring this insignificant pleasure to ludicrous extents.

By the time he finished the process she was already agonizing, but then touching every inch of skin on each other's body had seemed so primordial too. They canoodled on the bed for what seemed like hours, introducing themselves to each other's anatomy in a slow dance of veneration. As much as the anticipation blazed through their flesh and core, they both couldn't shed this sense of reverence for the moment. And they couldn't break their gaze, even when all she wanted to do was shut her eyes and surrender.

Jesse was bathing the valley between her breasts with attention and it was heavenly, but she needed him inside of her so desperately that her "Jesse, please" wasn't more than a hum. She rubbed the soles of her feet harshly against the covers, thinking she was going to pass out again if she didn't get some release, and since Jesse seemed effectively dazed by his own explorations of her curves, she took the task upon herself. Shelby let her sweaty palms travel down his abdomen toward his hip and brought him closer.


	5. Other Side of the World

**A/N: Finally, here is the last chapter of this weird, dark little tale. I just want to thank anybody who stayed with it, even though my updating went beyond erratic for a while there. I also want to thank my beta, who puts up with my totally not funny jokes and my constant nagging, including that she edited this chapter faster because it was my bday. Thanks, Lynds. Best present ever. **

**I also realize I've been super neglectful with my disclaimers, so, just to be clear, I don't own Glee or these characters, and I write these stories for fun. I promise that when I get deluded and decide to write for profit, I'll do so with my own characters and universe, because stealing is never cool. **

**And finally, for the ones that still have any interest, here is the end of the journey. I really hope it was worthy spending some time with Shelby and Jesse, no matter how dubious the premise was.**

* * *

><p><strong>Chapter 5 – Other Side of the World<strong>

"Jesse", Shelby whimpered as Jesse raised the dark cloth over her eyes, her chest constricting. "Please, don't."

Jesse and she had spent the last hour or so unhurriedly making love, electricity blasting from the friction between their two bodies, sinking into every single one of their pores and cursing through their bones. Shelby couldn't remember a time someone had been so focused on her that it seemed that they were trying to reach into her soul and caress it. It was cheesy, but she had never felt this exposed and this adored, and regardless of the fact that she had known Jesse forever and he was always a very open human being, there was something so raw and mystifying about him too when they were engaged in this level of intimacy, that it was daunting. She had felt as if her body was going to melt under the pressure of her streaming feelings.

She had laid worn out on the rumpled sheets, the sweat she had worked up coming in contact with the sudden cold air and giving her chills, and her muscles so wobbly from the exertion that she had remained useless while Jesse had persisted on nibbling her lip until she hissed in pain. The little cut from earlier must have opened, because she could taste a bit of blood and Jesse had looked so upset that he had scrambled to the other side of the bed.

They had lied there quietly, uptight, both of their brains gripping for a course of action, a talk point to diffuse the tension and being faced with a total blank. Shelby even allowed her hand to seek out Jesse's shyly, but lost the nerve midway through it. Both of their instincts in these circumstances had always been to let their minds remain empty for as long as humanly possible, being that they had a considerable history of resorting to meaningless sex as a stress valve and an escape, but in present company, it was just awkward.

The oppressive silence had made Shelby edgy and she was downright freezing; she had scanned her side of the bed for her blouse, but since it was nowhere to be found and Jesse's t-shirt was clearly dangling on the end of the mattress, she had crawled towards it, swiftly covered herself and hugged her knees. The night was darker now, the moon was hidden and as she sat closer to the window she noticed it had started to rain thickly while Jesse and she were distracted.

"This is usually when I fling my leather jacket over my shoulder and get the hell out," Jesse had whispered flatly. Shelby had cracked up laughing, because they were so impossibly alike, that even her wall of self-consciousness couldn't keep her enjoyment in. Jesse had looked at her with curiosity and asked "What?" with an indignant flare.

"Well, I usually wait until they fall asleep before slipping on my underwear and making a dash for the door." Shelby had turned to face Jesse, who was sitting against the headboard now, and they had smiled at each other, amused, accomplices; leave it to them to be so jaded in the booty-call sector that even after such a monumental event they could continue to demonstrate some horrible post-intercourse manners.

Thankfully, something had snapped in Jesse that he had decided to drag himself to her for a cuddle. He slid his legs around her and embraced her, and even though affection after a fuck was something she avoided like the plague, she was comfortable. Shelby nuzzled into Jesse, curling her legs, and rested her head against his shoulders. She brushed his biceps in a hypnotic rhythm, soothing herself back to an almost sluggish state, letting herself just be and enjoying this incredible tranquility while her brain was still so filled with endorphins that she had yet to become violently desolate. Jesse had started to rock her softly and it was inevitable how droopy her eyes became, but she quickly startled herself and jumped away.

Jesse kept trying to snuggle her, but she was so stiff all of a sudden and she kept squirming inside his grasp. He had watched, uneasy, as she buried her face in her hands; one minute before she had been on the verge of nodding off and then she had become overburdened with stress. Jesse had sat there, befuddled for a moment, even as he stroked her back hoping to offer some comfort.

"Shelby, what's in your head?" Shelby had shaken her head stubbornly, but otherwise, had stayed on her own world. "Did you regret this already? Is that the problem? Shit, I really am a bad person."

Shelby hiccupped loudly and looked at him in despair. "Please don't say that. Don't think that. You're not a bad person. We are not bad people. We are just… a bit troubled." Shelby pulled both of her hands through her hair nervously; Jesse palmed both her cheeks and brought her close to his face.

"I never said anything about you. You're jumping the gun on the guilt. I mean, for fuck's sake, I'm still naked."

Shelby once again shook her head weakly and sighed; she was so tired she felt she lacked energy to muster an explanation. She was sure the mistake she made would weigh on her at some point, but at that moment, she had just reacted against the prospect of being unconscious and oblivious of what Jesse was up to. It was too much, too soon.

"I'm just… I think I'm still a bit shaken from my nightmare. Please, don't worry. And don't blame yourself. You're jumping the gun too." Shelby was trying really hard to hold it all in – the primal fear that was crippling her, the sobs bobbing to the surface, the anguished scream rasping her throat – and it was all so much she was about to implode.

Jesse saw her close her eyes, defeated, crumbling under too much pressure, felt her forehead rest against his chin and heard her seemingly fighting to not hyperventilate. It slashed at him, being faced with the unmistakable truth: Shelby would indeed get out of that situation deeply traumatized, and he needed to start doing things to help her heal. He needed to give her some new thoughts, because she was about to collapse under so many negative ones.

"Shelby, listen to me. I don't want to kill myself. However, since I can see this tugging at your heart, I am going to promise you that every time I feel myself doubting my own worth, I'll think of this moment. I'll remember just how special I was to you, that you would give yourself this way, open yourself this way. But I need to ask you for the most difficult thing right now; I need to ask you to trust me. Trust me to follow through on my promise. Because I can't have you consuming yourself with this worry. I can't have you draining yourself to the ground while fearing for my life. I am going to become a star. And then I'm going to make sure I help some people too. And I'll do all of that, and never again think of giving up, because I love you and I'll make you proud of me. Wherever we are in ten years, I'll make sure you will feel you were right about caring for me, even after all the harm I caused you."

Shelby pressed her nose against his neck, her chest rising in labored motions against his. Keeping her concern at bay would not be easy. But Jesse was finally letting go and he was even talking about his future again, and she couldn't be the one keeping them stuck on the present – that had been how all of that appalling situation had began – because of one frightening nightmare and five seconds of self-doubt the kid had indulged in. She had to be rational and power through her reservations, even if her heart was still strangled. She knew her past, the way she lost people that she loved, was making her biased to the point of it being pathetic. She couldn't give so much credit to a dream, especially it being a creation of a mind as jarred as hers. But it was so hard to diffuse all of her sickly concern.

"Also, I promise that from now on, anytime I start having bad thoughts, I'll make myself think of how good you taste instead."

Shelby contained a smile that twitched on her lips, because she didn't want him to think of himself as highly amusing; not in regards to that subject. She squeezed his side threateningly and was about to start a rant but gave up when he added, "And I love myself so, so much." She could tell he badly needed to ease her down from the nerve-wracking condition she had too hastily moved into and she didn't want him to worry either. She dwelled on his speech for a while, until admitting to herself that as much as she was wary of promises, she had to believe his. Otherwise, she would never have a night of sleep again. He was right, she was probably going to need a couple of months and maybe some hardcore therapy to get truly over this, but she couldn't obsess about it until it destroyed her. She knew Jesse had mellowed considerably on the last few hours and that convincing him to take her home was a more palpable reality now; she had a baby and new life to sweat over and she was going to put herself together for both of their sakes.

"I trust you."

"Good," was his curt reply, and in her mind she could picture the trademark Jesse smirk that accompanied that intonation, "because I'll need you to trust me right now."

Shelby had wanted to grill him on that cryptic message, but before she dared, he had leaped from the bed in search of something; he had returned with the piece of dark cloth in his hand and Shelby had panicked at seeing it, but before she could put some distance between Jesse and herself, he had already wrapped the blindfold firmly around her head.

Shelby was shaking as Jesse's fingers trailed down her arms. "Relax." He whispered on her ear, but she just shook her head. He couldn't understand that it was not just what had occurred in the woods that had affected her. Even if she had committed herself to believing him, it was much too soon for him to want her to put that in practice. She didn't have the calm in her to be blinded just yet.

"Please, stop," she begged, feeling the urge to cry on the back of her throat. Jesse obeyed and stopped touching her, but that only made her panic all the more. "Please, take it off. I don't want to play this game, I need to see you."

Jesse immediately understood. She still didn't trust him not be off her sight making suicidal plans. Whatever she had seen on her nightmare, had really fucked with her head. He grabbed one of her trembling hands gently, and placed it on his bare chest, over his heart. Jesse saw her exhale sharply and then wind down a little.

He let his fingers brush her jaw and brought her face up, so he could capture her lips with his. Shelby opened her mouth to allow him to massage her tongue with his, while her other hand trailed the side of his naked body tentatively. If he was close and busy, she was less prone to freak out.

She felt him pull away, but not enough that the contact between them was broken, and she drew solace from his heartbeat in order to not lose her shit while he sat next to her. Then he grabbed her by the waist, lifted her and placed her on his lap. Jesse removed his shirt and then kissed one of her breasts sweetly, caressing the back of her thighs slowly.

"Again, relax," he murmured in the intervals of his relentless nibbling on her neck, "I want you to feel good. If you're not enjoying yourself, we will stop. If the fear is bigger than the pleasure, I need you to tell me. But I also need you to try, at least for a minute, to let yourself have fun."

"Mmm, okay," she stuttered while his mouth moved to one of her nipples, his tongue and teeth doing some crazy stuff to her, and he rubbed the back of her knees vigorously, discovering a pleasure point she didn't even know she had and making her moan louder. "Fun" was not exactly her word of choice to describe it, but it was definitively beginning to override the horror she had felt initially.

He brushed his knuckles through her abdomen, too fast for her to enjoy the feather-like sensation properly, but slow enough to make her clench her legs in frustration. Until his long fingers reached down and trailed her slit. The other hand quickly made way to support her when her head and body tilted backwards and she swayed, losing her balance because of the lack of vision.

Shelby could feel the digits teasing her lips tactfully, the stimulation that she needed standing elusively away; close, but not quite there. Shelby leaned forward gradually until the tip of her nose hit what she was almost sure was Jesse's eyebrow. He was laughing while she guided herself around his face, until she met his earlobe. She swiftly swooped her tongue through the cartilage, then bit on it, and she racked her teeth against the sensitive side of his neck down and back up; she grabbed his ear into her mouth and started sucking this time, until Jesse's amused laughter turned into a husky "Dear God, please stop."

"I'm better at this game than you." She punctuated with a satisfied smile. She knew he had already realized it, that was the whole point of the demonstration, but she couldn't pass on the opportunity to brag.

Jesse thought he was going to pass out from the arousal. Every second that he spent being in awe of the fact that Shelby was currently doing sexy things with his body, was an inch closer to an orgasm. He let two fingers slip inside of her and she made this little whimpering sound, and it was paradise. He stroked her clit in circular motions with his thumb, and the patterns she was making on his skin became all messy as her mouth became frenzied.

Then she felt him stop altogether, when she was so, so close and she almost started to cry; the sound she actually did make was a cross between a gasp and grumble.

"Are you having fun yet?" he asked teasingly and she just hissed, "Jess, I'll hurt you," because far from her to take violence lightly at that point of her life, but if he didn't carry on she would die. And well, the "Ouch" coming from him when she bit his shoulder meant she had succeeded, without really doing something that would churn her stomach.

Jesse pulled her hair, not too roughly, and kissed her, definitively roughly. It hurt a little, but she didn't mind it terribly. His other hand pulled her legs further apart so she was pressed closer to his groin, and his nails rasped again the back of her knee once more making her whine into his mouth. He was obnoxiously proud of himself, but he decided to end her affliction; his arm closed around her waist, holding her still and he penetrated her.

**TGO**

Shelby was warm. As she slowly regained consciousness, that was the first thing to stand out, quite possibly because she had had a long dry spell of overnight cuddling. But this was clearly that type of warmth; the unique temperate presence of another body pressed into hers. Jesse's arm involved her waist, his palm still pressed protectively over her stomach; at some point of their overly long night, they had completed the Intro to Physical Intimacy for Badly Emotionally Damaged People 101 syllabus by seeking yet another level of comfort in each other's body, and if she recalled it correctly, she had ended up unwinding to Jesse's unrelenting caresses on her abdomen.

Shelby rubbed the sleepiness out of her eyes, but other than that, relished her unexpected and certainly improper-in-too-many-degrees-to-ponder position inside the loving embrace of her 18-year-old student. She knew she had to separate herself from him and start what would sure be a painful process of self-recrimination and flagellation already, but it was tempting to dive further under the covers and let the real world become a blur of demanding pressures and over-glaring failures she could avoid.

However, the slightest change of position awakened her whole body, sending pins-and-needles sensations to her arms and back, and her wrists in particular started throbbing in an excruciating manner. Shelby crawled away from Jesse carefully – though if he hadn't stirred to the barely muffled complaining noises she had been emitting, she was sure he was in very deep sleep, and instinctively drew closer to the nearest source of light: the window. That was when it hit her like a truck. Despite the storm that still raged the skies and the clouds that covered their heads like a blanket, it was bright outside. They had slept past dawn, and their predicament had become so convoluted that they had overlooked a very important matter: they needed to go back home.

"Shit!" Shelby jumped back in bed and shook Jesse by his shoulders. Jesse blinked and then groggily stared at her, his hair all disheveled and seeming so cute that her heart rate almost dropped from its race to cardiac attack.

"What?" he mumbled, annoyed, while drying drool from the corner of his mouth.

"We overslept."

Jesse looked at the window, nodded and closed his eyes again.

"Jesse!"

"We don't have rehearsal today," he muttered in a barely understandable scrambled voice, and tried to reach out to her and bring her back to his arms. She slapped his hand away, but pulled his arm in a futile attempt to make him get up.

"No, we don't. But Jonathan still will go to Carmel to oversee the Horse Riding training, and do budget and shit…"

Now Jesse was awake. He sat in bed, his eyes widening in a very cartoonish way while the same worry that poured out of her in buckets seized him. "Your things. Your car."

Shelby nodded, standing up awkwardly in the soft mattress before jumping out, and realizing she was way too old for that when all of her bones complained at her landing.

"We have to go," she insisted, frantic, while trying to locate and gather all of her clothing. Jesse put on his boxers and took his watch from the bedside table; he looked at it for a while, and Shelby was about ready to shout at him to get moving when he materialized next to her, grabbing her upper arms and gently guiding her to sit on the bed.

"Shelbs, it's 7:30 AM. Even if we leave now and rush, which we can't do with this weather, we wouldn't make it to Carmel before noon. And we would be risking our lives." He had explained carefully, leveling their eyes and brushing her hair, but she still went rigid at that revelation, as he had expected she would. He could understand why this information would intensify her feelings of apprehension and helplessness, but considering he was the one in risk of being found out and arrested, he needed to keep her from dramatically overacting.

"What? Where are we?"

"Not that far," he explained, brushing her arms, hoping she wouldn't realize that was a gross lie. They were technically out of state. "But the road is made of dirt, and is kind of a rough path. Listen, we are going to take a shower; you go first while I fix us some breakfast. We are going to eat, and while we are at it, we'll devise a plan. We need a plan. Okay?"

"Okay," Shelby breathed, seeming more desperate than appeased, and Jesse had to push her up and drag her down the hallway. He stopped at the linen closet and grabbed her two clean towels. Shelby was standing there hugging her blouse and pants against her chest and looking well off in stupor of fear. She took the towels from him impassively, and when he pointed to the bathroom in the end of the corridor, all she did was raise her gaze at him. Her eyes were moist, and she had this expression of overwhelming anxiety that informed him she was on the path to her umpteenth breakdown of the last 24 hours. He cupped her cheeks into his hands and made her look at him.

"It's gonna be okay, Shelby," he whispered in which he hoped to be a very reassuring way, before passionately kissing both sides of her face.

Shelby numbly made her way into the bathroom and halted in the doorway to finally examine it. It was kind of rustic, like the rest of the house, but it seemed practical enough. She could only pray, to all things that were sacred and some that were not, that they had hot water.

She closed the door behind her, got rid of Jesse's shirt and climbed gingerly into the shower, hoping for the best and bracing herself for the worst. As soon as she turned the faucet, a jet of cold water hit her, making her jump back and release every dirty word she could remember, but then, after she gave it two minutes, the temperature grew to be bearable.

While she waited for the actually burning heat she never favored, but was going to indulge in with hopes of loosening up at least a bit of the strain on her body, she went to the sink and at last took a good look at herself. If she was honest, it was actually worse than she expected. There was small patch of purple skin over her distinct cheek bone and her already full lips were slightly swollen. She looked ten years older and five shades paler all of a sudden. And she knew she had yet to face the worst.

Cautiously, she undid the bandage on her left wrist; the cuts didn't look so bad. She needed to clean them again, and she wasn't sure if the gooey thing Jesse had plastered on it helped it or made it worse, but other than a glaring bruise, it wasn't that scary. She moved to her other arm and once she was done, that was the moment she thought she would throw up. It was a jumble of purple, red and yellow – and she was positive that yellow meant horrible things, there was dry blood caked and mixed with that thick ointment and even touching it carefully was incredibly painful.

Shelby forced herself to climb into the shower and took deep breaths before letting the hot water hit her body; as expected, the pain was so epic, it almost knocked her out of her feet. She held onto the wall, and walked a little further into the stream, enjoying the scorching liquid massaging her scalp and melting into her grimy hair. It was uncomfortable to a degree, but she needed that. Once she got used to the divergent sensations though, she realized that her physical wounds had been distracting her from her dread.

She knew Jesse was full of bullshit. Nothing was going to be okay and she was terrified. If Jonathan entered her office and saw her things still there, her computers still on, the broken jar still sprawled on the floor, the signs of struggle and who knows, maybe even blood, he would freak out and think something bad happened to her. Well, something bad had happened to her, but even after all of their conflicts, she would have a hard time dissociating her Jesse from kidnapper, assaulter Jesse. There was no way she could report him, help indict him.

Even in the unlikelihood that they buried this incident, they would not be fine. Shelby had no idea how they would move on from this situation, and how she would be able to act professionally with Jesse, as if everything was normal, when they went back to their usual lives on Monday. The thought of this gigantic lie becoming her life for the next two months intensified her nausea, and her chest became so heavy both of her arms were weirdly insensitive.

Plus, the mere idea that somebody would be able to figure out in any way how she had slept with Jesse, threatened to tumble her to her feet. Her whole life would be over. She would lose Beth, Rachel would probably be too disgusted when she found out too, her students would be baffled and likely lose all their respect for her and she would never work again. The fear that permeated her made the tears even the physical pain didn't cause stumble out of her eyes easily. She covered her face with her palms in shame and allowed herself to bawl, her frail body quaking convulsively. She felt so overwhelmed; she was so scared, she couldn't even think. She just wanted to get out of this chaos and have all of this magically erased. She just wanted to go home.

**TGO**

Shelby had stayed in the shower sobbing until the water turned cold. Regardless of the shock from the change, she had compelled herself to actually clean her body and wash her hair with the fruity shampoo either Jesse's mother or sister had left behind. By the time she stepped out and wrapped herself with the towels, she felt her throat and lungs ache and understood what a big mistake that had been, but carried on. She examined her clothes and noted they were filthy, probably from all of that unintended rolling on the dirt she had done the night before, so she stalked out of the bathroom in only her underwear and a towel to ask Jesse if there was something she could borrow. Another decision to deeply regret as soon as the cold air assaulted her.

She found Jesse in the living room, serving a very frugal version of breakfast on the coffee table. "It was all we had left here. Sorry." He explained it awkwardly, when he found her staring. She just shrugged and mumbled a half-hearted "It's fine, I don't eat much in the morning." Per her calculations she hadn't eaten anything in almost sixteen hours, and yet, incredibly, she had no appetite. The plate with toast, jelly and butter seemed like way more than she could stomach, even if in her brittle state she could use the nourishment.

"Do you have some clean clothes I could wear? Mine are disgusting."

Jesse hit himself on the head, as if expressing how stupid he was and ran out to some room. He returned soon with some dark yoga pants and a thick gray sweater and she was actually a bit torn about accepting. Those clothes so clearly belonged to Heather, and she was just hoping for some of Jesse's own sweats. How would she give this back later? But it was frosty in the cabin and she felt weak enough without opting to stand there half naked and half way through turning into a popsicle, so she didn't dwell much on it before expressing some mild gratitude and going to the bedroom to put them on. She also took the opportunity to redress her cuts clumsily, if only not to have to look at them anymore.

When she went back outside, Jesse was gone. She guessed he was probably trying to take a shower and felt awful, because not only she had used all the hot water, it had completely escaped her to warn him of that fact.

Shelby ate a dry toast just to appease her stomach, filled a mug with coffee and walked outside. She wasn't a big fan of storms, but there was something about the smell of the wet soil and the trees that it was nice. She wasn't an outdoorsy person, she didn't do nature at all, but she could appreciate the freshness and ostensible vastness of the environment she had been dragged into; it made her feel less imprisoned and suffocated.

She stared ad nauseam into her cup. The smell of coffee could always calm her down, but she couldn't avoid bitterly musing that her life was as murky as the liquid at that moment. And she was having coffee more to have something to occupy her hands and her mind with than to actually wake up. At least, the scorching beverage alleviated the strain in her throat a bit. She felt so faint and sickly, she was considering going back inside to eat some more when Jesse showed up at the porch, a mug on one hand and a blanket on the other. He chuckled and shook his head at her.

"You know, mad woman, when I said we should have breakfast, I kind of meant inside."

Shelby wanted to laugh and lighten up, she desperately need to feel her body and mind relax for even one tiny second, but she seemed stuck in this perpetual turbulence. Dread had taken over every single cell, like a black veil, choking her slowly into animated corpse condition. Everything that mattered to her was at stake; Jesse's well-being and future headlining that list in a twisted irony of epic proportions. Jesse settled next to her, pulling the blanket over both of their shoulders and taking a sip of his coffee.

She wondered for a moment if he had noticed her become stiff, but since Jesse put his coffee down next to him and started brushing her back under the sweater – because of course now he imagined all boundaries were off – she guessed he did. She was torn between wanting to punch him and tell him how much she hated him for breaking her in a million pieces, running out into the rain and screaming her lungs out or begging him to hold her and whisper some more empty promises that they were not doomed.

Evidently, Jesse decided to embrace her without needing any coaxing, and all of her resistance was frozen, bobbling on the surface, vibrating like a drum, but for some reason contained. And then Jesse started asserting a new round of palliatives and it all started to spill in waves, her anger, her fear, her sadness. She tried to clench her jaw because she was so tired of crying, so damn over feeling so frail, but her body was wobbling in a way that she believed she was about to explode from inside out.

"What are we gonna do, Jesse? I'm not on your side on this. I don't wanna shrug it off and say it's nothing, and it's all forgotten, because it isn't. You did a few things yesterday you should be punished for, because they can't be taken lightly. The slap was… provoked, and I'm willing to see the door incident as an accident, but you held me at gunpoint, and you abducted me, and that thing in the forest… But I can't report you to the police. How the hell am I expected to depose against you? To throw you in jail? I can't."

Jesse adjusted the blanket around her and pulled her in a way she was basically curling on his lap, but she didn't allow herself to indulge to the comfort of his body. Her life was short of over and she couldn't keep adding dirt to her own grave. But Jesse had a grip on both of her arms and she was trapped.

"Shelby, c'mon, please be calm. Who would have known that someday I would be the one between the two of us to be able to maintain a clear head, huh? I've already solved the car issue, Shelby, don't worry."

Shelby stopped wriggling and searched his eyes, hoping she wouldn't find neither mischief or dumbness there. She had heavy doubts on Jesse's problem-solving abilities, but she also needed badly for him to really come through to her just this once.

"How?"

"My mother was closer to Carmel than we are, so I asked her to go get it."

"What?" Shelby muttered, her voice barely there, her air barely there.

"And yeah, I told her about the abduction. I didn't give her many details, but she is sure to interrogate me when she gets here."

Jesse gave her an eye roll that confirmed to her he didn't take what he had done seriously at all.

"Why would you do that? Why would you involve someone else?"

Typical Jesse behavior. He hadn't ask her if she was willing to go to all lengths to cover up his crime, and his solution had been to just rope somebody else into committing obstruction of justice on his behalf. And Heather being brought into it made her feel even more powerless. She was about to become seriously outnumbered by two people that had one common goal, protecting Jesse, and she had no idea where her well-being would be factored in.

Again, she in no way believed this would all come naturally to Heather. Jesse was ripping them both in half. Shelby was sacrificing her convictions as a human being to forward the one purpose she held higher than anything else as a teacher: making sure kids like her had better chances of making their dreams come true than she had experienced. Heather, on the other hand, would defend her son with all her love, but that required neglecting her life-long honorable work as law-enforcement agent. And Jesse might be oblivious, but Shelby understood how that would rob the woman from a few peaceful nights of sleep, at least. Betraying such a vital part of your soul was not simple and Shelby really wished Jesse hadn't been so careless to put yet another loved one in that dire position.

"Jesse…" Shelby sighed wearily, not even knowing how to begin to expose her qualms, but Jesse started brushing it off and kissing her forehead, and then he separated them and looked at her seriously. "You are burning up!"

"I am? I wasn't feeling so well, but I didn't know."

Shelby groped her own forehead, which sure enough, was on fire. She wasn't positive if it had been all of the ill-advised temperature shocks her body had endured or some sort of problem with her wrists, but at least it explained why she felt so unwell.

"C'mon." Jesse was on his feet out of the blue, and one second later he had managed to pick her up, bridal style and the time you took her to scoff and roll her eyes and protest was enough for him to get her back inside and into the room.

Jesse insisted on cleaning her wrists once again, which hurt more than words could possibly describe; maybe her uncontainable yelps colored the picture for him a little. He didn't wrap them or put anymore gel on it, and just explained that they would get her arms taken care of, without going into much details about the where and how. She didn't think they were in a position to walk into a hospital; the police would probably be called within the minute of an experienced doctor taking a look at her.

However, Jesse had convinced her (quite easily, given the circumstances) to take two more painkillers, and she had been emerged in a thick fog, until her body surrendered and she fell into a dreamless sleep.

**TGO**

Shelby felt a gentle pressure against her forehead and tried to remain alert. Jesse had been checking on her and doing cold compresses sporadically, and every time she woke up he would force her to drink some water or tea and then go back to sleep. It was acceptable, because she had been feeling like a truck had run her over all day, and the more lucid she was, the more she agonized about the danger they had put themselves in because of that one night, by means that were viewed in civilized societies as both despicable and criminal. However, she needed to be knowledgeable about her own health state. She at least wanted to be informed of how high her fever was, because she could be in some serious risk and she couldn't trust an 18-year-old to be the judge of that.

"Jesse?" Her head was so hazy, that even her tongue felt foreign all of a sudden, so her limbs seemed almost extraterrestrial. She hated feeling this helpless and when even her, somebody so strongly against going to hospitals was starting to long for one, she supposed things had skidded past the deep end.

Her eyes seemed to have glue in them, but she forced them open anyways and took a minute to blink and try and dissipate the blurriness. But even before clarity installed itself in her sight, the overly considerate way in which her hair was brushed away from her forehead and the grave yet feminine voice that inquired her if she was okay, made her realize in whose company she was and her heart beat a little faster.

Heather St. James was staring down at her with a mixture of sorrow and pity that caused Shelby to recoil violently from her motherly touch and try to rise, but Heather stopped her and Shelby had to acquiesce to the reality that, in that moment at least, the older woman was incredibly stronger than her. Heather's honey hair was shorter than she remembered and pulled messily into a ponytail; hell, Heather's whole persona was a far cry from the usual put-together, very no-nonsense image Jesse's mom had always made sure to project. She looked remarkably worn-out and distraught as well.

"How bad is it?" Shelby mumbled, hoping that her voice was understandable to a degree. It was definitively not crystal clear, and the effect that had on Heather was also pretty visible before she took note of Shelby's attention and slip on a mask of cold, courteous pragmatism.

"It's bad." She didn't lie, but Shelby hadn't really expected her to do so. "But I brought a doctor with me, and he'll take care of you."

Shelby was confused and a tad more hesitant. She desperately needed medical attention, but she couldn't conceive of additional people getting implicated in their dilemma. Unless, there was no dilemma at all. She had no uncertainties that as perplexed as Heather certainly felt about this whole state of affairs, she would rather secure the secrecy of this mishap before letting her only child that hasn't already paid some time in a psychiatric institution go to jail. She didn't know how liberal Jesse had been with information, so she wasn't positive if Heather was completely aware that Shelby herself had grudgingly opted to remain on Team Jesse. And she didn't want any unknown doctor shooting her with stuff before that was evident.

"Did you come here to make sure I'll stay quiet?"

Heather gave her a brief recriminating glare that Shelby recognized all too well, from the countless times she had shut up a student who was babbling some obvious garbage, before exhaling loudly and letting a tiny amount of dejection reach her eyes.

"I would never be that cruel."

Shelby swallowed thickly, not really wanting to accuse a woman that she knew to be nothing short of a grand example of integrity and empathy, a person that had dedicated her career to protect those that couldn't do it for themselves and put criminals away; but a mother was a mother. That was the strongest bond in the whole world, the protective instinct that would squash all others. So Shelby was still not comfortable in her position; objectively, she could destroy both Jesse and Heather's legacy by coming clean any day, they were three against her impaired self, and if they desired for her to never leave that cabin alive, she wouldn't.

Shelby struggled a bit but sat down and took one of Heather's hands into her own. They didn't know each other all that well, but they had developed some kind of relationship over their affection and investment in Jesse. They had earned each other's respect at some point, which was not an easy deed. They had an unspoken vow of honesty; and staring into the older woman's green eyes, Shelby was going to invoke that. She was a mom now too.

"Heather, I'm not going to tell the police about this. Or anybody, for that matter. Please, I just want to go home."

"You can't possibly think I'd condone this violence or come up here to cause you even more harm."

She could hear a spike of offense in Heather's tone. She was silently asking if Shelby didn't know who she was anymore, but the truth was Shelby didn't.

"I don't think I can be confident in what anybody is capable of doing or not anymore. And I just want you to understand where I'm coming from. I'm not going to change my mind, Heather. Not ever. I don't care if I get dragged kicking and screaming to a police station, I'm not testifying against Jesse. I can't be responsible for sending him to jail."

Heather visibly mellowed and regarded her with this new realm of compassion that Shelby didn't like any more than the previous ones, but at least it felt less menacing.

"You love my son, don't you?"

Shelby didn't respond, but surely the way her whole body turned into stone, her breath hitched and her face flushed were enough signs for somebody as experienced in reading people as Heather to get her answer.

"I know he loves you, to have done what he did."

Shelby nodded, incredibly self-conscious and closed her eyes, not wanting to crumble in front of Heather St. James, head bitch in charge of the fucking FBI and the scarier parent of the student she had just sort of taken advantage of.

"I'm not saying that this is your fault, and I want you to understand that. It would be the same as affirming that any woman that falls for any guy is opening herself for abuse. My son did something incredibly wrong, that is not to be blamed on you in any way. And his life should be over because of it."

"I could never do that."

"What he did to you is unforgivable…"

"And yet, I forgave him…"

"And it's abuse."

Shelby opened her eyes and faced Heather, hoping at least some of the fire that was cursing through her veins was conveyed appropriately. The only good thing about carrying the weight of this lie forever on her shoulders was that she was not going to have a thousand people making that argument to her every day.

"I know. I'm not stupid or deluded, I'm aware that what he has done should have bigger repercussions and that if he ever hurts another soul, I'll be partially responsible, because I held back. I know I should feel more sorry for myself, and that I should resent Jesse a whole lot more. And I certainly feel pretty betrayed; but I'm tired, sick, confused and torn, and I just…"

"Love him."

Shelby had no clue if Heather could imagine to which extents she had loved Jesse. In fact, the older woman was seeing so clearly through her, that she expected to be unmasked for her own indiscretion. And how disgusted would Heather be when she was sure that Shelby had touched her son? Would that wipe out the gratefulness and kindness the woman was showing her?

"Mom?"

Jesse showed up at the door with his hair wet and a towel thrown carelessly over his shoulder, indicating where he had been all this time. Against any good judgment, Shelby shot him a pleading look. He might have been the cause of all of her misery, but Heather was right, he loved her too. Even in all his selfishness, she doubted he would let anybody take at stab at her. And she needed him to deal with his mother, because she was too confused and fearful to progress that conversation.

"I'll send the doctor in, while I have a private moment with my son. If you need anything…"

Heather left right away with Jesse in tow. He shrugged at her at the door, before turning around and following his mother to the front of the house, and five seconds later the man she supposed to be the doctor entered her room carrying a bulky black case that looked too much like a prop in a horror movie not to make her shudder.

He had grey hair and a flimsy build, but that wasn't exactly putting Shelby's spirits at rest; neither did the benevolent smile he offered. Shelby positioned the pillows against the headboard and leaned back, her nails nervously brushing her legs while the doctor rounded the bed and sat next to her.

"Hi, Ms. Corcoran." Shelby tilted her head and flexed an eyebrow, wondering if the fact that Heather had given him her real name was a good or a bad thing. "I'm Doctor Scheinberg, the St. James' family physician."

"Okay," she answered drily, keeping her eyes on his open bag and whatever was coming out of there. So far, it was only the stethoscope; consequently, she didn't try to make a run for the window just yet.

"There is no reason to be afraid," he assured gently, but she flashed him an icy glare. Was he serious? Did he often make house calls to check on the conditions of hostages? Because she felt she had plenty of reasons to be overwrought, and the fact that he seemed at ease only contributed to that.

"I just want this all to be over," she clarified between gritted teeth, while the cold metal touched her skin. Then he put the cuff on her arm to measure her blood pressure and questioned about her history of diseases, so she casually mentioned cancer, as if she didn't feel a pang where her uterus should be at the mere thought of it.

"Do you feel any pain?" He stopped to write some notes in a tiny pad, and Shelby anxiously tried to get a look at it, but it was too far away.

"No, I just feel like all my bones have been incinerated and then patched back together."

The acid response got his attention, but he seemed more bemused than anything. "I was told you had a nasty head wound."

She dismissed with a half-hearted "It was not that bad," but he seemed less worried and she took it that a dark sense of humor was a positive signal after a probable concussion.

The voices of Heather and Jesse started getting louder in the living room, and she could discern Jesse saying he was sorry about five times. Doctor Scheinberg was meticulously examining her wrists and then poking her arms and hands with his pen and asking her if she was feeling it. "Flex your fingers, please," he asked and then added "I need to check if there was any nerve damage, Ms Corcoran," when she responded by looking blankly at him.

Shelby grew fidgety, because it hadn't occurred to her that she could have such a serious injury just from being restrained, and obeyed, now more invested in the whole exam as well, but it seemed that her hands were thankfully fine.

"Okay, I think we just need to clean these cuts and dress them. You don't need stitches." He concluded, making her almost weep in relief.

"What, Nurse Jesse didn't do a good job at cleaning them?" she joked and he laughed, actually laughed, and Shelby was starting to believe the old man didn't have sinister intentions against her.

Heather's voice took a dip into an acute territory Shelby knew so well from her job, and she could tell that her discussion with Jesse was making the woman increasingly emotional. She heard the word 'jail' being brought up and then Jesse said something back, but the only thing Shelby managed to pinpoint clearly was the sound after that. The patent reverberation of a smack.

Shelby felt the hairs on the back of her neck stand up and froze. That mere echo made her sick. She hadn't realized that, damn it, one more thing that Jesse would deprive her of would be juicy daytime melodrama; she never watched TV, but she was sure looking forward to enjoying the crappiness of it when she left her job to become a stay-at-home mom. Now, violence put her on edge.

She was so sidetracked by Heather's action that she only noted that the doctor was about to pierce her with a needle when she felt a pinch in her arm.

"No!" She jumped away from him, shaking, trying to get away, and her snap was so loud that by the time he explained that it was just a shot of antibiotics and that she needed it because yada, yada, infection, yada, yada, fever, both Heather and Jesse had materialized next to her and Jesse had quickly climbed into the mattress and hugged her.

"Bill, Shelby is terrified of needles," Jesse explained right away, making the doctor become less befuddled. It hadn't been the real reason she had freaked out, but Shelby was good with not having to enlighten things. The doctor took another pad, one that seemed to be for prescriptions, and started explaining all about the antibiotics that he was ordering her to take, but she was already drowning him out.

Jesse was listening intently, but she brought his head down and forced him to look at her.

"Can we please go home now? Please?"

Jesse nodded without even checking with his mother, but Heather made it clear two seconds later that she was driving Shelby back to Lima while Jesse would accompany the doctor back to Toledo, and neither Jesse's protests nor Shelby's were capable of dissuading her.

So, an hour later, Shelby found herself sitting on the passenger seat of her own Range Rover, a death grip on her Blackberry after she had checked her messages; she would have pre-dialed 911, but she didn't want to seem too obvious. At least she had a phone, and the gun Heather had taken back from Jesse was locked on the glove compartment in front of her, with any luck still unloaded.

The road was still a bit wet so they were progressing slowly, and the car was swaying in a way that was making Shelby extra sleepy, but she was fighting it with every bit of power she still possessed. Heather was extremely vigilant due to the poor conditions of their trip, but couldn't help stealing a glance at her once again covered wounds every ten minutes.

"It's not his fault, Heather. I struggled against the handcuffs. They were tight. I'm sure Jesse had no idea it was so tight."

Heather harrumphed and shook her head, but didn't initiate what they both knew to be a failed debate. They both were too hard-headed. Shelby turned away, feeling bashful about going on a limb on Jesse's favor – after all she was aware that it was Jesse's fault she was bound to begin with and that it was yet another detail Heather didn't care about knowing – and told herself she was only going to rest her eyes for a second, but ended up jolting twenty minutes later according to her phone. They were still on the mountain, progressing even more unhurriedly, since it had started raining again.

"I owe you so much," Heather ended the thick silence, her voice broken and a choked sob resonating between them and startling Shelby. Gone was the practiced stoicism, and abruptly Heather's green eyes were brimming with tears. "I could… should have lost my son. And the reason why it should have happened devastates me. I'm so disappointed at myself as a mother, at my partner as a father, at my kid as a human being. I'm so frightened, and I feel torn too because everything that I am, that I worked hard to be my whole life, tells me I should deliver my own son to justice, and yet, I can't. But the worst part is knowing you are this hurt, that you were emotionally and physically abused by my kid, and there is nothing in this world I can do to fix this, to make it better. It's only been a couple of hours, but you are wrecked."

Shelby looked away from the older woman and brushed her arm uncomfortably. She knew what Heather was doing; she was examining her the same way she did with the case subjects that ended up on her desk, and she was giving her a reality check about emotional trauma. Shelby understood why Heather would try to nudge her like that, the woman's guilt was palpable even as Shelby resisted trusting her, but she really wasn't ready to be put into that box.

"I can see all the marks I note in victims in your behavior right now, and I know my son put this dark thing in there. It's okay to be confused and torn, due to your feelings for Jesse. But I don't want to hear you defending him or trying to explain him. Because seeing you remain loyal to him right now, it's just pissing me off. It's my job, my life obligation, to not let victims disintegrate under the pressure of their sympathies for their captors and the only reason why I'm vacillating right now is because Jesse is my kid. And that's going to haunt forever."

"You can keep him away from me." The words had been out of her mouth before she could have stopped it, not that she was sure she should have. She really had forgiven Jesse, and what they shared was actually pretty special and she would remember it fondly despite the circumstances. However, she had signed up to a lifetime of silencing and bottling up something extraordinarily muddy. She would fall apart sooner rather than later if Jesse remained perched on her shoulder, taunting her and reminding her. "I… I don't know how to ask him this, but I need some space right now."

Shelby had initially considered anticipating her leave. She had no idea how she would find the power to carry Vocal Adrenaline through another Nationals and take Beth home. However, she needed to stay busy. It was the only way she knew how to cope, never stopping long enough for thoughts to arise.

"Oh, don't worry about it. I never intended to allow him to go back to Vocal Adrenaline, and I'll find a way to get him out of your classes too. Besides, he already knows he's spending his whole summer in some sort of military camp, which his father and I will choose. I know you probably don't think an ambient like that is ideal right now, but I need him to be in a place he hates and wishes he could leave, so that he can experience the feeling a little bit. Also, no more freedom to come and go wherever he wants and do whatever pleases him. He's not staying at the condo in Lima anymore, he'll make the trip from and to Toledo everyday with a designated driver, and he is not allowed to go anywhere but school. Weekends will be spent in community service with any organization that tends to women who have been victim of violence, and I'll make sure he talks to a couple of kidnapping victims I have kept in contact with so he can understand the full extent of his actions. I know it's not enough punishment for what he did, or half of what I owe you…"

"No, I… Thanks."

Shelby was actually impressed, though she shouldn't have been. It wasn't jail, and it wasn't anything that would hurt Jesse like he had hurt her, but she didn't want revenge. Or justice, for that matter. She wanted him to understand that his actions were not okay and she wanted him to become a better person.

Heather seemingly wanted to give Jesse tools to turn his remorse into a device to improve himself as a human being, and Shelby endorsed that. At least, it was some consequence; she had been disillusioned with herself for not reporting something she would have, if anybody else in the world had been the one to point a weapon at her and assault her.

The truth was she was also protecting herself, and not just because she had broken a rule by surrendering into Jesse's body. The more she had to admit that this happened to others, to go over the details and get asked about her well-being, the harder it would be for her to move on. She didn't mind that shutting down and pretending that it was all a nightmare wasn't healthy. She had so many eggs in her basket at that point of her life, she just needed to get back on her feet and figure out her emotions later.

After four hours, Heather had finally managed to reach Lima, and had taken them to the mall where she had parked her own car before going to get Shelby's at Carmel. Shelby felt frankly crappy about having doubted the woman's principles, especially when she had been hugged tightly.

"It's is all over now. You're safe," she had whispered softly into the younger woman's ear and Shelby had needed to steel herself not to break down. She had genuinely been unsure until the very last second, and she was dying to rush home, take a bath, eat her own food, lie on her own bed, and let the veracity of her security flood her dispirited being. "I hope you'll be fine; that if you need any help to get over this you will find it and that you will recover fully. If you need to talk to someone, even though we are not exactly friends, I would love to be there for you. And don't ever forget, I owe you."

Shelby had nodded quietly into the older woman's shoulder and then let her go. It was too much information for her to process. She wasn't sure if Heather was frantically trying to patch a band-aid over both of their open, burning wounds, if she felt too accountable to resist offering her companionship regardless of the fact that her being Jesse's mother demanded a Wall of China between them now or if she just needed to urge the brunette to keep her pain between the knowing players.

Shelby wished Heather hadn't tried to be kind though. She was used to being alone, but the isolation she was about to experience over this secret was sure to be unmatched. And once the car door was shut behind Heather, it all crawled over her heart so hastily, that she just jumped into the driver's seat clumsily and steered her Range Rover towards Lima Memorial without a thought.

The hospital nurses were sweet to her and let her see and hold Beth, even though it was not visiting hours yet; admittedly, her saying she had been mugged the night before to explain the bruises on her face earned her extra sympathy points, but as she cradled the little bundle of life against her chest, knowing she was her daughter and she would get to have the baby in her home soon, for the first time in twelve hours the storm of daggers piercing into her relentlessly stopped and she felt calm.

**TGO**

Shelby had never been able to cope with a high-school crush. She had experienced attracting a lot of sexual desire, mostly from her reputation of being reckless and easy, but now, almost turning forty, it had been the first time she had been forced to walk down a school corridor and then frantically try to go in another direction as a boy surged on her path. And it wasn't even because of her love, per se.

It was simply that crossing paths with Jesse made her abruptly come down with all those symptoms her female students had described to her at one point or another – sweaty hands, blushing, accelerated heart beat, nausea, coyness, a rush of adrenaline and all her thoughts turning into static. If that was what dating as a teenager felt like, she could almost understand why she had so much drama in her hands all the time.

Fortunately, those moments were rare. The first day she had returned to Carmel High, almost one week after her abduction, due to her persistent infection and then to the fact that Beth had gained sufficient weigh to be taken home, she walked into her auditorium straight into Jesse. Standing there, five feet away from him, in front of her other 25 performers, she had been paralyzed.

Thankfully, Jesse had been there to explain to the team that, just like Heather had promised, he was quitting. He had answered all of their questions and talked at length about a vocal chord injury Shelby knew to be inexistent, and then finally left for good, being followed by Shelby herself. She had needed to cancel her first rehearsal back after one measly hour so she could finish shaking in the privacy of her office, and stepping inside the room where it had all begun, everything had come pouring down on her and she had ended up suffering a very real, very daunting panic attack.

Jonathan had found her curled on the floor, thinking she was going to die, and her overwhelming stress coupled with her notice had been enough for everybody to concur that she needed an assistant. Someone she would train on the job to take over during the summer after Nationals, which had allowed her to spend even less time at school. She would put everything together and then leave Dustin Goolsby running the rehearsals for hours, then she would return with Beth, scream at them, fix things and get some real progress out of the team.

It was hard to take Nationals without Jesse and with her working part-time, but she still had a vision for true spectacle, and the other teams might be good, and hell, even better singers or dancers; however, after seven years, they were still trying to figure out to put on a magnificent show. That's why she once again won. Even when Vocal Adrenaline was flawed, and that year it was more glaring than ever, she kept people stunned and excited long enough that before anybody actually questioned that misstep or that flat note, she had a new shiny trophy on her case.

By graduation day, she had her office all packed. The only reason she was attending was because she was being honored for the eighth year in a roll as best teacher, and well, not even sharing the vicinity with Jesse could make her back down from giving one last hug to some of her favorite kids.

Jesse didn't engage her, not even when he thanked her profusely in his Valedictorian speech, and all Heather had done was offer a smile from afar. Theodore on the other hand, had clearly been kept out of the secret because he had approached with his daughter to grill her on her decision to quit while a healthy-looking Sophie fawned all over Beth. It had been awkward, to say the least, and it reminded her of how lonely she had indeed become. It was so hard to have any conversation with anyone in her life without it being swarmed with deceit and evasiveness.

By the time it was all over and she had left Beth with Andrea for a minute to go grab boxes from the office and transfer them to her car, she was exhausted. She stormed into the place making sure to not dwell on anything too much, because she certainly didn't need a repeat from her first day back, but on top of one of her boxes there was a piece of folded paper she didn't recall.

She closed the door carefully behind her, all air abandoning her as she already knew who would do that, and picked up the letter. She expected something less direct, honestly; maybe more fumbling and certainly with a lot of discomfited apologies she wouldn't believe to be wholesome. But all she got from Jesse as a good-bye, fittingly enough, was a song. With tears streaming down her cheeks, she read the lyrics, even thought she knew them by heart:

_If I should stay_

_I would only be in your way._

_So I'll go but I know_

_I'll think of you_

_Every step of the way._

_And I... will always love you..._

_I will always love you..._

_My darling you_

_Bitter sweet memories,_

_That is all I'm taking with me..._

_So goodbye, please don't cry._

_We both know I'm not what you need._

_And I... will always love you._

_I... will always love you_

_I hope life treats you kind_

_And I hope you'll have_

_All you've dreamed of._

_And I wished you joy_

_And happiness._

_But above all this, I wish you love._

_And I... will always love you..._

_I will always love you..._

_I will always love you..._

_I will always love you..._

_I will always love you..._

She hugged the now wet paper against her chest as she both sobbed and chuckled. She had fallen to pieces because of him, and she wasn't even halfway through mending herself. But not having Jesse was the worst part of all, by far. And the whole farewell was tacky and it twisted the knife a bit in her heart, but she knew the feelings were true. She was happy they both had found ways to accept they were not the person for one another, and as big a scar as his cruelty had left, she wished him well too.


End file.
